How can one manually & locally clone image to device using Clonezilla?

[moses]

I’ve got a notebook I need to image from FOG, but alas, the ethernet adapter is dead.

Is there a way to manually write a standard single disk/resizable Windows 7 image that I have on my FOG server if I copied it to a portable HDD? I’ve used Clonezilla in the past, but I’m sure with resizable images, there might be some extra steps involved.

Here’s the image as it is on my FOG server:

[george1421]

@moses said in How can one manually & locally clone image to device using Clonezilla?:

Is there a way to manually write a standard single disk/resizable Windows 7

This would be an interesting idea. FOG doesn’t support it, but it would be interesting feature to add.

In your case you DO have a few options. The requirement is having a usb to ethernet adapter. Since your computer’s firmware will probably not support pxe booting off a usb ethernet adapter you will have to boot via a usb stick. You can either boot into the iPXE kernel or boot straight into FOS. There are advantages and drawbacks with either approach. But it IS possible to do.

[cml]

First, I haven’t tested this. If I had a usb drive laying around I’d gladly test it first.

Do you know how many partitions you have in your image?

On your server you can run ls /images/W7PUniversalx64STANDARD

I only have one partition, here is my output:

root@Fed-Fog:~# ls /images/StaffWindows10/
d1.fixed_size_partitions  d1.mbr  d1.minimum.partitions  d1.original.fstypes  
d1.original.swapuuids  d1p1.img  d1.partitions

My thoughts:
Set up a bootable linux usb. It needs to have at least partclone and pigz installed.
Copy the d1p1.img file to a usable spot on the drive at /images/d1p1.img for ease.
Boot the machine from the usb
Partition disk correctly, and create filesystem
Write the image to the hard drive using:
cat /images/d1p1.img | pigz -dc | partclone.restore --ignore_crc -O /dev/sda1 -N -f 1

I’ll bring a drive tomorrow to test and follow up.

[george1421]

@cml You can boot FOS from a usb drive. You can do that in debug mode so you can access the linux console. I’m not suggesting that your concept will work or not, but if you use FOS then you will have all of the tools (required programs) you would need for your proof of concept. Setup the FOS usb drive and pick option 6 for debug.

But if you are going to go that far, why not just use FOG to image the target computer.

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7727/building-usb-booting-fos-image

[moses]

@george1421 I completely forgot I have a USB ethernet adapter. I’ll give that a try.