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I wan to use Clonezilla to Copy an Entire Disk to another Server. As the Source Disk resides on a Server, I do not have Access to the server to use a Live-CD. I will therefore have to use the command line from a "rescue System" that lets me mount the Disk I want to clone.

But I have not found any information how to use clonezilla from the Command line. I would be very thankfull for advice how to

  1. Install Clonezialla not(!) to a live CD but rather as a linux system => On Debian 6.0 I do not find anything using: aptitude search clonezilla

  2. What parameters to use to clone for example /dev/sda

2 Answers 2

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Install clonezilla, then run /opt/drbl/sbin/clonezilla (Debian might put this somewhere different, if it's not there, look around a bit for it) . There's a curses-based GUI that will take you through the process. You don't have to screw around with command line arguments at all.

As far as installing it, it should come with DRBL, which you can find at http://drbl.sourceforge.net/

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You will need partclone to be installed in the "rescue System".

You can also use a dd+gzip to make the image and then restore it. You can also transfer over the network with netcat.

Destination:

nc -l 12345|gzip -d > /dev/sda1

Source:

dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=1024000|gzip |nc  1.2.3.4 12345

Where 1.2.3.4 is the destination IP. And 12345 is the port in the range 1-65535.

edit: Notice that this approach requires that CHS is the same on both disks. Cylinders, Heads and Sectors. Otherwise you can have boot problems. At least with windows. PS. I coulnd't find the comment button - therefore the edit.

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  • Thanks Mircea! I upvoted. However that what you described was already that, what I had done. However I have the hope, clonezilla does ist more efficiently. Regarding your example, to improve it you should before using gzip "zero" the empty space for higher compression efficiency. However the described approach took a lot of time and I hoped clonezille had some further tweaks to cut this down. Thanks for your answer.
    – Markus
    Oct 9, 2011 at 18:09
  • I didn't used dd as far as I was told not to do so as it would copy the free space in the disk too. Idon't know about dd + gzip Oct 19, 2017 at 16:48
  • gzip is just to speed up the operation by compressing the data when network is slow or you have a lot of compressible data like text. Oct 19, 2017 at 18:30

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