Step 3: Cloning

Finally ready to start the cloning process.  With the USB stick plugged in and the hard drive enclosure attached and powered on I boot up the laptop.  For my laptop, a Lenovo Y550 ideapad, I hit the F12 button while booting up to select boot options.  I get a menu that gives me the option to boot from HDD, ODD, HDD, and USB.

I select USB as that is where Multisystem Boot is at, the first HDD is the new blank drive, the ODD is the empty optical drive, and the second HDD is the failing drive I am replacing.  Selecting the USB brings up another menu with the option to select one of the Operating Systems on the USB, I select Clonezilla.

Rather than re-creating a walkthrough of using Clonezilla I would suggest you check the Clonezilla Walkthrough on their website.  However, I used the advanced mode rather than the beginner mode, because I like to see what options are available.  I mostly used the default selections anyways which would be the same as beginner mode.  Though the first time I attempted to clone this disk it failed, I will get to that in a moment.  Just a word of warning be careful when selecting which device to clone from and to clone to, because cloning a blank HDD to your full HDD will wipe it out.  Clonezilla warns you of this as well, but knowing the brand and size of your HDD will help.

Now the reason my first attempt at cloning failed was not that I had done anything wrong, but that there was physical damage to the /dev/sda2 partition, so it was aborted.  This partition, sda2 happened to be the main partition for the O/S, in this case Windows 7.  So I when it finished I had a new HDD that had a master boot record and two restoration partitions, but no main partition, so it would not work.

Here is where the advanced option came in handy.  I ran Clonezilla again and this time I opted to make use of the check/repair option and I also checked the --rescue option.  The former ended up doing nothing because it uses fsck to check and repair, which works on Linux partitions or those not formatted in NTFS.  Windows uses NTFS, so fsck did nothing, but the --rescue option did kick in, and allowed the HDD to be cloned but had to skip a few blocks that were corrupted.  In my case since the HDD could be booted from still, albeit very slowely, rescue managed to get what I needed to have a running system.  After waiting a few hours for the cloning to complete I am happy to report I now have Windows 7 running on this laptop again.

Though I miss the snappiness of Ubuntu loaded on that SSD.