Cloning Your Disk Drive

If you read through the different Dell Mini forums, you undoubtedly have come across a few posts that talk about “Cloning” or “Imaging” a disk drive. So, what exactly is cloning and imaging, you might ask? And, why would you want to do such an operation?

Disk drive “cloning” (or “imaging”) is exactly what it sound like… you make an exact copy of the contents of a specified disk drive and save it to an image file. This is usually done if you want to mirror all the files on one system onto a different system. For example, let’s say you have 12 computers in a training room that are identical (same hardware, monitor, video card, etc) and you have the job of loading WinXP SP3 on each of them. One method, is to manually load WinXP on all 12 machines one-at-a-time. This would be very time consuming, and you’re bound to make a mistake here and there. Instead, you can load WinXP on ONE machine, clone the disk drive (which copies the entire contents to an image file), and then re-image the remaining 11 computers with that image file. When you’re done, all 12 computers will have the exact same operating system files as we as any applications you decided to load on the original computer before you imaged it. Make sense?

In our case, we don’t have 12 identical computers to re-image, but rather we want to clone the Mini system disk to save it to an image file. Why, you might ask? Because this image file can serve as a complete backup of our system and files. Since we have a pristine backup, we can then mess around with our Mini by installing a “slimmed” down version of WinXP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux, etc. and when we’re all done we can re-image back to our original WinXP system. So as you can see, having a cloned image file of our virgin system can be pretty handy.

Now, since the typical WinXP installation on a Dell Mini laptop is about 5 GB in size (before you begin to load applications), you will need about 5 GB of storage space to contain the image file. Also, if you install applications like OpenOffice or MS-Office, those files will also be part of the image file (since cloning a disk drive copies everything on the drive) and you’ll need the appropriate amount of space.

So, what tools are available for cloning a drive? If you do a bit of research, there’s quite a few commercial and freeware applications. Here’s a list of some of the commonly used apps:

Norton Ghost (commercial)
Acronis True Image (commercial)
Clonezilla (open source freeware)
Macrium Reflect Free (freeware)
DriveImage XML (freeware)
HDClone (freeware and commercial)

Like most people, I like to use freeware applications whenever possible. Of course, freeware apps usually require a bit more effort to get working, but most seem to eventually do the job. Below are my comments with experimenting with the various cloning software mentioned above. I’ll be adding more comments as I test more applications.

One thing to note, is that most cloning software requires the use of a CD/DVD ROM Burner to burn an image file to a CD or DVD, and also to reload it. For the Dell Mini that’s a problem since it doesn’t come with a CD/DVD Drive. So, you need to either get an external USB CD/DVD drive or find a way to do everything using USB Flash drives.

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Clonezilla (freeware)

Clonezilla is open source, and uses various open-source applications to do the cloning process. You basically create a boot disk that you use to boot up your system into a small Linux environment, and then follow a set of on-screen instructions for Clonezilla to make an image of your system to an image file. The interface seems a bit primitive, but it does work well.

Since I don’t have an external USB CD/DVD drive, I need to do everything using USB Flash drives. Fortunately, that is possible using Clonezilla. First, you need to create a bootable USB Flash drive with the Clonezilla software installed. If you go to the Clonezilla web site, they have detailed instructions on how to do this. I followed their procedure using an old 128 MB Flash drive and it worked great.

Now that I have a USB Boot Flash drive (with Clonezilla), I then take a 2nd 8 GB USB Flash Drive and format it as FAT32 on my Windows XP system. This 2nd Flash Drive will be used to store my system cloned image file.

I then insert the USB Boot Flash drive into the Dell Mini and do a reboot (having the system boot from the USB drive). A compact version of Linux is installed, and after seeing several lines of text scroll by, the Clonezilla menu system appears. Everything is pretty much explained on the menu screens, and you can use most of the default settings. At one point, the menu will as you where you want to write the image file and it will also inform you to insert a USB drive if you want to use it for storage. At this point, I insert my 8 GB USB Flash Drive, wait 5 seconds, then select it on the next menu screen. Finally, you are asked what drive you want to clone (normally called “hda1″ in Linux), and then away it goes! If you run out of disk space for the image file, you’ll get a warning message, otherwise Clonezilla will finish with a “Successful!” message.

To reinstall this image file to your Dell Mini, just follow the same procedure but on one of the menus you’ll tell Clonezilla to “restore” and not “create” an image file. It’s a very old-school approach, but it does definitely work since it’s so low-level.

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HDClone (freeware version)

The makers of HDClone have a freeware version that is quite capable of creating disk images that can be stored in a file. The freeware version differs from the commercial basic version in that the write speed is about half as fast (deliberately done so that you’d think about upgrading). Otherwise, the software is very good and easy to use in my opinion. The application is essentially one file called hdclone.exe which runs inside Microsoft Windows. When you first start up this application, you see the following window:

Here, you have three options: (1) Start the HD Clone application, (2) Create a bootable disk, (3) Quit. I’ll start with the second one, since it seems that creating a bootable CD (or USB Flash Drive) is a difficult thing to do. If you select the center button, you’ll see the following window appear:

Here, you can make a bootable disk with the HD Clone software installed. In my case, I want to make a bootable USB Flash Drive, so I insert my drive in an open USB port and select the drive letter under “USB medium”, and click the “Make bootable” button. That’s all  you need to do. Note: The USB drive must be formatted as “FAT” (not FAT32 or NTFS), so make sure you format it appropriately before selecting it.

Now that you have a bootable USB Flash Drive with HD Clone on it, we can work on making a clone image of our Dell Mini system disk drive. Start up HD Clone again and select the “Start HD Clone” button from the main window. You should see the interface as shown below:

This interface is also very easy to use, as you just click on the desired source and target icons to define an image save or restore operation. Once you make this selection, click the “Next >” button to proceed to the target selection screen. Here, you select the main disk drive that you want to clone (see below):

Clicking the “Next >” button again display the next screen where you select the target drive. In our case, we want to select the USB Flash Drive that was already inserted in the USB port. You also have the option to format the target drive to FAT32 if you haven’t done so already (because of this, you can’t have the USB Boot Flash Drive be the same drive holding the image file).

After specifying an image file name, click the “Next >” button to proceed. The application will then create an image file of the source disk drive to the specified target location. In our case, the image file will be written to a USB Flash Drive. Just make sure your Flash Drive is large enough to contain the entire image file. For a virgin Dell Mini system (straight from the factory) you’ll need a Flash Drive that’s 5 GB or bigger.

Now, that was easy! The big question is how easy is it to re-image a Dell Mini 9 with HD Clone? It’s actually just as easy, since the program interface looks exactly the same as what you’ve seen so far with this windows application. If you insert the USB Boot Flash Drive in a USB port and reboot your Dell Mini (set to boot up from the USB drive), you’ll see the exact same screens as shown previously. You can then insert your 2nd USB drive (that contains the image file) into a 2nd USB port, and use it as the source for the re-imaging. Very easy.

Between the Cloning software that I’ve tested so far (Clonezilla and HD Clone), I like this one the best.

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