Some time ago I created a backup of an EXT4 partition with Clonezilla. Now the HDD crashed and I lost some important data.
The size of the image of the partition is 50GB. I tried to restore this image to a 200GB HDD but it turned out that the size of the original partition was 500GB. Since I don't have a 500GB HDD for dumping available I figured out how to force Clonezilla to ignore it by passing -C
to partclone. But while recovering it stopped with the error target seek ERROR:Invalid argument
.
I could imagine that the data on the partition is fragmented so that the actual bitmap doesn't fit. Is there a workaround for this? I have a HDD with about 600GB available but I don't like touching the partition table or such. Ideally would be a way to restore it to a mountable image. (ISO or such)
Best Answer
since you have the 600gb empty you can mount your current HD and copy its files to the 600gb !
or you can make a new backup using dd+gzip and you will have chance to restore your hard drive without problems of loosing space.
if you want to do that from your current runing os :
mount your current hd (since it is an ext4 it can be mounted on different places).
now you will make some changes if you want to boot with 600gb
use
blkid
to get HDs UIDsupdate the grub in your current os it
reboot into your fresh copy inside $DST_HD and then wipe your SRC_HD or any.
if you want to do that from a live os with gzip dd gunzip :
backup again your SRC_HD to a raw image
restore it from the raw image
but before restoring it it's good to wash your SRC_HD
washing a hard drive is creating a file inside th hard drive filled up with zero, and removing that file!
acoording to the hd size it will take some time and it will stop with a 'disk full' mesage !