I'm now using Clonezilla to back up my MSI Wind netbook Windows XP partition, using a USB thumb (flash) drive. I actually found it by accident when I was looking for a suitable disk imaging application for Windows. For the uninformed, Clonezilla runs on Debian Linux.

Clonezilla versus Norton Ghost

I have a copy of the latest Norton Ghost, but it does me no good when I don't have a CD drive connected to my netbook. I can use it to back up the partition, but I can't use it to restore the partition should something go wrong. It has to be booted from a restore CD.

Clonezilla on the USB drive takes the place of a CD and allows me to backup and restore with little effort. I haven't used it for full disk imaging yet because I still need to take the hard disk drive from my dead notebook computer and put it in into the Ovation USB HDD case I have waiting to be used.

Installing Clonezilla on a USB Flash Drive

Installing Clonezilla on any USB flash drive is really simple. The instructions, "Clonezilla Live on USB flash drive or USB hard drive", tell you exactly how to do it. The instructions also tell you how to make a thumb drive bootable, but mine doesn't boot. I went through the process, though, because I can make it boot by pressing F11 while the netbook is starting up and selecting that drive.

Of course, the thumb drive has to be plugged in before starting booting the netbook or it won't be an option under F11.

Using Clonezilla

While Clonezilla starts up, you have a couple of selections for video and keyboard to contend with, but they're pretty simple to figure out. If you make the wrong choices, you can always exit the program and start over.

After you start the actual application, you have even more choices. Clonezilla is not for the novice user unless the novice user is pretty good at figuring out what the device names mean. Fortunately, I have experience with both UNIX and Linux.

Still, it took me a while to figure out how Clonezilla works the first time I used it. You have to select the device where the backup is going to be stored or where it's going to be retrieved from before you can select the partition you want to backup or restore.

On my netbook, I had three choices: /dev/sda1 (the restore partition which I later nuked on purpose), /dev/sda2 (the Windows XP OS partition) and /dev/sda3 (the rest of the drive). Since I was only going to save the backups from the OS partition to the empty partition, I chose /dev/sda3 as the storage partition. I then selected /dev/sda2 as the partition to backup.

The backup process took about 30 minutes because I don't have a lot of things installed under Windows XP on the netbook. There is a specific reason why I won't be adding a bunch of applications: I plan to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, using the "Boot ISO from USB Flash Drive" instructions, and see if I can get away from Windows completely.

The backup files are stored in a specific folder on my storage partition. It comes to about six gigabytes, much too large for me to move them to another drive right now, so I'm stuck until I get the nerve to attack my dead notebook computer and remove the hard drive.

Similar Posts:

• Install from CD without an Optical Drive
• How to Watch DVD, DivX or XviD Movies on a Netbook
• Should You Buy the New Checkit Netbook Utility Suite?
• Copying the Uncopyable
• Software for My New Netbook