Making a bootable USB from an existing hard disk
From WikIRI
Contents |
General process overview
Disclaimer: All this processes and tools are highly dangerous for the integrity of your data, so do it at your own risk.
The idea based on tools availables, is this:
- Make a clonezilla image of current hard disk (will serves as backup)
- Use GParted to addapt the size of hard disk to the USB storage size
- Make a clonezilla image of re-sized hard disk
- Use Gparted to restore the starting size of hard disk
- Build a LiveUSB based on clonezilla image
Preliminaries
Clean your hard disk
Since you are trying to get a bootable minimal image from your hard disk, first thing you should do its clean up the space not needed.
Remember an USB as big as space occupied is recomended. Most of the cases, a robot operative system under 10Gb it's enough.
df and du are good shell tools to use.
Prepare your USB
You need to make a couple of partitions in your USB. One will host the clonezilla bootable image and the other will be used by clonezilla as destiny for the image. Remember to use FAT32 as format for the first partition.
- FAT32 primary bootable +500M
- FAT32 primary rest-of-disk
You can use cfdisk or fdisk, depends upon how freak you are.
Next is to format both partitions using the good old mkfs.vfat command.
Clonezilla image of current hard disk
Install clonezilla in the USB
In order to get a clonezilla image bootable via USB, best method is to use tuxboot app. You can download it directly in a binary format.
Install the current stable clonezilla from the menu of tuxboot into the first partition of your USB.
Boot with clonezilla and store the image
This step is optional but it can save you from lost all of your data: it will build a backup image.
Plug you USB into the computer which host the hard disk you want to clone and use the BIOS controls to boot from it.
Once booted, after language selection, do the following steps:
- device-image option
- local_dev option to host image storage. It will ask you in which partition you want to store the image, be sure to select the second partition of you USB.
- save_disk' and be sure to select your hard driver.
Done, wait until finished.
Resize hard disk using GParted
Next step is to resize your hard drive. This is needed by clonezilla to store the image in your USB since it can not do operations from image -> partition if the original partition was bigger than the destiny.
Install GParted in a bootable USB
Same as installing clonezilla, please use the tuxboot app to build a bootable USB device. Select in the tuxboot menu the option called Gparted Live Stable.
Using GParted
Boot with the GParted USB. Gparted graphical interface is quite friendly and easy to use. Resize your partition to the minimum allowed and done.
Clonezilla image of the resized hard disk
Repeat the steps documented before to build an USB bootable clonezilla and do the following steps in menu:
- device-image option
- local_dev option to host image storage. It will ask you in which partition you want to store the image, be sure to select the second partition of you USB.
- save_parts' and be sure to select your partition.
Leave clonezilla to do its work and done.
