Thanks to a scratched CD I discovered a new/updated tool for my toolkit this week. See, I was swapping hard drives between two laptops: one is 500 GB and the other 160. Oh, and I didn’t want to have to reload either of them.
Before the swap I booted each from my trusty Clonezilla CD and made disk images of both laptops. That part was quick and easy. I physically switched the drives and attempted to restore the image from the 500 to the 160 drive. I figured this wouldn’t be an issue since it was only using about 25 GB… Alas, Clonezilla doesn’t like to restore to smaller drives.
OK, no worries. The easy way to solve that is to just shrink the partition (on the big drive) to something smaller than the destination drive. I tossed in my trusty Gparted CD and… hit a snag. Scratched CD couldn’t boot properly.
Before downloading a new one, I was inspired to see what my options of having both Clonezilla and Gparted on the same boot CD might be. Parted Magic is the first I found and is definitely a keeper. Boots quickly and loads to RAM so it runs quickly as well. Not only does it include Gparted and Clonezilla, but it bundles in quite a few other useful tools as well.
Works well as a little “pocket distro” too. Good stuff and I’m now a fan.
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Sure could’ve used this earlier this week when I expanded a VMWare virtual disk with XP on it. I ended up cloning the disk with vdiskmanager, adding the cloned disk to the VM, switching the disk device order to boot from the cloned disk, using diskpart.exe to expand the partition on the original, and switching the device order back and removing the clone from the VM. It worked, but jeepers that’s a lot of juggling.
An alternative which does much the same is GParted Live. The core of both systems is GParted, which is an easy-to-use GUI disk partitioning program, and they both have a lot of other useful tools.
You can use Virtual Clone Drive for cloning your drives or extracting some files which were splitted into parts…Virtual Clone Drive is easy to use and have lots of other useful tools…