In Which I Finally Discover Clonezilla and GParted
One of the older home laptops finally died yesterday. Not totally unexpected, she’d been ailing for a while but she finally had to be put down.
* moment of silence, please *
The hard drive in that laptop was a 7200 RPM drive so I decided that it would be a nice upgrade on this Dell D600 Latitude that I’ve been using lately. Of course, the thought of reloading everything wasn’t appealing so I looked for options.
In the past I’ve used a combination of DriveImage XML and Bart PE to copy an image of one drive onto a new one. However, I couldn’t get it to work properly this time – was having USB drive issues of some sort and the write would fail about 5 minutes into the process.
Worked out OK though as I had a chance to try out Clonezilla instead. Now that I’ve used it it definitely has been added to my toolkit. A dead simple way to copy and restore disks and partitions for sure.
Just to add challenge I made the disk image of the old drive over the network to a Windows server. Worked great. The restore was just as simple and I’m now sporting a faster / larger drive with no reloads necessary.
While it was all very simple to use, I did make one small miscalculation – my new drive now had a paritition of 60 GB which was the size of the old drive. The rest of the space on the drive was unallocated.
Since it was a day to try new (to me) software, I downloaded and burned a boot disk for GParted (Gnome Partition Editor). It allows one to create, move and/or resize partitions without losing data.
I was easily and quickly able to “stretch” my partition to use the entire drive. The interface is clean, clear and easy to use and definitely comparable with some of the commercial products I’ve used in the past. Another one for the toolkit for sure.
I can’t believe I’ve not used either of these until this point, but I’m sure glad to be aware of them (finally)!
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