I have an Acer Aspire R laptop with 260GB SSD, UEFI, Ubuntu and Windows 10 dual boot. How can I backup / clone / image the whole drive to be reinstalled on a new drive if current drive fails?
- Clonezillla: Will it backup all partitions (EFI, recovery, Ubuntu, swap, Windows) to external drive, so I can restore it to a new drive, no problem? Which file system should the external drive have?
- GParted: Or should I partition the external drive like the existing drive and copy the partitions with gparted?
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Answer
You can use Clonezilla to make a bootable copy of the whole existing SSD with all of its partitions including Windows.
The boot menu comes from Grub2 and it gets created from templates in /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub.
So, if your Clonezilla ISO file lives at /srv/iso/clonezilla-live-disco-amd64.iso and /srv directory lives in hard drive 0 in partition 13, then create a new executable file in /etc/grub.d, such as 40_clonezilla and put the following in it:
#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
menuentry "Clonezilla live" {
set root=(hd0,13)
set isofile="/iso/clonezilla-live-disco-amd64.iso"
loopback loop $isofile
linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live union=overlay username=user config components quiet noswap nolocales edd=on nomodeset ocs_live_run="ocs-live-general" ocs_live_extra_param="" keyboard-layouts= ocs_live_batch="no" locales= vga=788 ip=frommedia nosplash toram=live,syslinux,EFI findiso=$isofile
initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}
Then, run update-grub to regenerate your grub menu.
When you reboot, you will have a new boot option that boots from Clonezilla, and, from there, you can make a bootable copy of the existing hard-drive onto an external drive and overwrite whatever is already on that external drive.
All of this stuff, editing Grub templates and overwriting drives is quite dangerous and the penalty for getting something wrong is high.