Clone Windows system using Clonezilla

2014-09-09


Even Windows 7 provides backup feature, but we still need to do cloning works. we have multiple computers which just shipped from computer store, which we need to install same Windows system on them, so cloning is the fastest way.

We select Clonezilla which is a free software and very popular, and, support multiple platforms.

For our case, we select Clonezilla Live edition, and want to use the bootable USB way.

Due to Clonezilla guide, we select “MS Windows Method B: Manual” from this page:

WARNING! DO NOT RUN makeboot.bat from your local hard drive! Doing so could cause your MS windows not to boot!!!

The steps what we did:

Note: You might meet different situations based on your case, so all steps what we provides are ONLY worked on our case, if you follow below steps, you know you take your own risk.

1: Download Clonezilla zip file (current version is stable releases - 20140630-trusty) from download page;

2: Make sure the USB flash drive format is FAT or FAT32 (we did not make a specified 200MB at least partition due to guide which easily confusing reader, what you have to do is that you make sure you have a FAT or FAT32 format, and available size at least 200MB, but we will try to store the disk image files to the same USB drive later so we prepared more bigger size USB such as 64GB USB);

image

Note:

Since we have a 64-bit processor so we selected amd64.

amd64, for use on PCs with AMD64 or Intel 64 processors. It supports multi-core processor, and multiprocessor. i386, general purpose for 386 CPU. It only supports single core, single processor.

3: We extract all the contents of the zip file (which we downloaded above) to the USB flash drive, and keep original directory architecture which guide requested, for example, file "GPL" should be in the USB flash drive's top directory (e.g. G:\GPL).

4: ON THE USB drive (must!!), under the folder utils\win64 (if you have a 64-bit Windows system) or utils\win32 (if you have a x86 system), right click mouse on makeboot.bat file, and click “Run As Administrator”, to make your USB to be a bootable USB with Clonezilla feature (when you boot the target system using this USB, the Clonezilla will start automatically)

5: Plugin the USB drive on the computer which you want to backup system to clone, boot from this USB, follow the on-screen instructions to clone your Windows system.

What we did was booting computer which we want to backup, start Conezilla, made image file for C: which mostly mean the name like “sda1”…, saved the image folder in another logic drive such as D: drive, and then we copied the final image folder to our external storage such as a USB drive (we copied the image file to the same USB which mentioned above); then we boot again, made image files for D: drive which was on “sdb1”, saved the image folder on C: drive, then we copied generated image folder to external USB drive again. We only have C: and D: so we had 2 different image folders finally.

Then we went to target computer and boot with the same USB drive, and stored the image file to target C: and D:

We will have more details process blog in the future, this time we only record the summary information, but we believe most of friend can do yourselves if reading this blog.