Question: I have a image which was taken with Clonezilla as SAVEDISK on a 160GB harddrive.Now a newer version of the PC released with a 120GB harddrive, the space in use is just 20GB
Is there a way I can force Clonezilla (or any other program) to manipulate the images ‘original size’ to 120GB or lower, so Clonezilla can write it to the new PC?
Answer: Clonezilla relies on Partclone to save and restore filesystems. Although it’s useful, even if you use the -icds option, that alone isn’t enough. When restoring the original filesystem on the smaller disk, Partclone will encounter a seek error trying to write beyond the disk boundary. So this is a limitation of not only Clonezilla, but the underlying tools it uses.
What you can do however, is to restore the image temporarily on a 160GB disk, use a filesystem resize tool such as ntfsresize (for NTFS) or resize2fs (for ext3/4) to shrink the filesystem, say to 25GB. Resizing the partition table, which GParted does, isn’t necessary. Use Clonezilla again to create a new image using the “savedisk” option.
When restoring the image on the smaller disk, use the -icds option to skip Clonezilla checking if the disk is the same or larger than the original disk. Since you shrunk the filesystem, Partclone won’t encounter a seek error and your data will be restored on your smaller disk.
If you used the option to restore the partition table proportionally (-k1), Clonezilla will create a proper partition table and resize (expand) the original filesystem so that all the free space on the new disk becomes available.
EDIT: The -icds option isn’t passed to ocs-expand-mbr-pt, so this step currently fails. A bug report has been filed about this with the project. The bug has been fixed.