Q4OS Forum

Rademes

Member

From: Latvia

Registered: 2015-12-13

Posts: 636

Creating an image of the whole Hard disk.

Good day!
I am trying to find the most simple and reliable program to create an image of the whole Hard disk with the ability to restore all partitions, MBR, and everything else, that needs to be restored in order to get fully working OS again.
I have tried Clonezilla and Systemback already, but, Clonezilla contains many options I do not need, separate Live CD needs to be created and also I had problem after restoring using it last time, but Systemback needs to be installed first (does not run from Live system), has compatibility issue with Q4OS, and can not be used with Windows XP, which is still being used by my father at work.
So I have read, that HDD image creation and restore can be done with dd and gzip, which are available on almost all Linux Live DVD`s:

1. Boot from a live media.
2. Make sure no partitions are mounted from the source hard drive.
3. Mount the external HD
4. Backup the drive.

# dd if=/dev/sdX conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c9  > /path/to/backup.img.gz

5. Save extra information about the drive geometry necessary in order to interpret the partition table stored within the image. The most important of which is the cylinder size.

# fdisk -l /dev/sdX > /path/to/list_fdisk.info

To restore your system:

# gunzip -c /path/to/backup.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdX

Can I use this method to backup and restore my Q4OS System?
If yes, can I use first command without conv=sync,noerror option, as I am not sure is it safe to use them.
Also it is important to know, should be destination drive`s size equal or bigger than the source drive`s size? I have SSD with installed system, which occupy 16GB. Can I write these SSD`s image on 16GB USB flash drive?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/disk_cloning

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Before asking for help please read this topic: https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3502   If you have problems with WiFi network, try to install the Network Manager using Q4OS Software Centre.

ghostdawg

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2016-09-19

Posts: 69

Re: Creating an image of the whole Hard disk.

I have multiple OSes installed but haven't tried cloning the whole HDD. But what I use for each partitions is fsarchiver.
FSArchiver is a system tool that allows you to save the contents of a file-system to a compressed archive file. The file-system can be restored on a partition which has a different size and it can be restored on a different file-system.

I've been using it for awhile and use it whenever I wreck a partition install.  It also comes on the SystemRescueCD for a live OS. It may be useful for your or not.

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Dell Optiplex 760 - Quad Core | 4gb | 250gb | Mageia 5, Salix 14.2, Q4OS
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