- How to restore clonezilla image to smaller drive how to#
- How to restore clonezilla image to smaller drive software#
Clonezilla will then create the disk image and write it to /mnt/files/images on your FreeNAS machine. Don’t worry, it performs this test without actually writing any data to the drive, so let’s select “Yes, check the saved image.” Now select “Enter” to continue, and confirm that you’d like Clonezilla to create the image by entering “y” at the prompt. This option is only for supported for certain Linux files systems, like ext3/4, and not for NTFS, so unless you have one of the supported file systems and have reason to suspect the file system may be in error, you should simply select “Skip checking/repairing source file system.” Clonezilla will then ask if you’d like for it to check if the image it creates will be restorable. Next, we’ll enter a name for new image and then chose whether we want to check and repair the file system before Clonezilla creates the image. Then select “Add” then “Apply changes” (Note: If you would prefer to use Common Internet File System (“CIFS”) instead of NFS, navigate to Services -> CIFS/SMB and select the appropriate settings and add your network share). The remaining options can remain at their defaults (See Figure 1). Enter the path to be shared the network that is authorized to access /mnt/files/images and, make sure that the “All dirs” and “Quiet” check boxes are selected. Now select “Save and Restart.” Next, navigate to Services -> NFS -> Shares and select the “+” icon, where you are presented with the configuration screen for creating a new NFS share. Login into the FreeNAS web interface and navigate to Services -> NFS -> Settings and make sure that the check box for enabling NFS is checked then specify the number of servers that will run (Hint: the default value of four should easily handle dozens of users). Next, let’s enable Network File System (“NFS”) service in FreeNAS so that /mnt/files/images can be accessed from Clonezilla. For the purpose of example, let’s assume there is an existing mount point located at /mnt/files and create a new subdirectory called images at that location. Let’s start by making a new directory in FreeNAS to hold the images we create using Clonezilla.
How to restore clonezilla image to smaller drive software#
The software versions used in this post were as follows: All steps involved assume you have a running implementation of FreeNAS.
How to restore clonezilla image to smaller drive how to#
In this post I will describe how to use Clonezilla to create image files of disks or disk partitions and backup those images in real time over a network to a machine running FreeNAS. Clonezilla is an open source clone utility for doing bare-metal backup and recovery for disks and disk partitions. That way I could use the restore disk functionality to make an image that was small enough for all target systems.ĭue to various issues, building the master image directly in a VM is not feasible for our situation.FreeNAS is an open source storage platform based on FreeBSD that supports file sharing across Windows, Apple, and Unix/Linux systems. Is there any way to use gparted (or another program) to resize the master drive before cloning it? I know how to resize individual partitions, but it would be really, really handy if I could do something to make Clonezilla think the original drive was smaller. Use this image as the golden master for imaging computers.
![how to restore clonezilla image to smaller drive how to restore clonezilla image to smaller drive](https://randythetechprofessor.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/clonezilla-live.jpg)
After preparing the master computer, use gparted to shrink the partition(s) so they will all fit on the smaller size disk.Outside of finding a physical drive that is smaller/as small as all of our target systems, I've used this method to get around our problem: Its well-known that Clonezilla won't put a disk image on a smaller drive. A recurring problem we have is that the computers we use to build our master images on may have larger hard drives than some of the target systems' drives.