Imaging dual boot drive?

ahuckphin · November 7, 2020

I am working with 50 plus identically speced Dell Optiplex 380. Core 2 Duo E7500 CPU, 4GB RAM, HDD.

I need to install Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04.1 on all the computers.

Installing one by one is a timely process based on past experience.

So i thought that I could at least try to speed up the Windows installation bit. I created this forum post

and learnt about the wonders of imaging.

Now I want more.

So I did a bit of googling and discovered clonezilla. Try to image a drive that contains both Windows 10 20H2 and Ubuntu 20.04.01 but ran into problems with the NTFS partitions.

Not shutdown properly, disable hibernated, run fdsk or something something says Clonezilla.Tried disable fast boot and hibernation but cannot.

Then I thought I can do half here and half there. Restore Windows first with Macrium Reflect in Windows then boot into Clonezilla to restore Ubuntu.

I managed to create an image of the Ubuntu partitions with Clonezilla but Clonezilla did not detect an unallocated partition that I created.

Any tips or help. I know it's quite confusing as there is many drives and computers involved.

Tldr, can I image and restore a drive with multiple partitions of different file structures?

Master Disaster · November 7, 2020

Using Ubuntu & DD is should be possible to create a byte accurate image of a drive. It shouldn't matter what is on the drive or what format it is since its literally saving every byte of the drive into an image on the HDD.

ahuckphin · November 7, 2020

As I wrote this topic, the idea to try to use Macrium Reflect to image a drive that contains Ubuntu and Windows came into my brain.

Success!

I previously thought this could not be done as Macrium Reflect does not support Linux file systems but upon double googling, turns out Macrium Reflect just can't be installed onto a Linux computer

Zagna · November 7, 2020

I did this for a Cisco Lab at school ages ago. 20 Optiplex machines which had 1 Windows install and 2 different Linux installs.

On a separate machine in a VM, I had DRBL. Then all the computers had PXE enabled. Just start the vm, connect 1 fully installed machine to it, Clonezilla the whole drive.

Then set DRBL to wait for 19 clients. Start all 19 other machines, watch as they all were fully imaged at the same time.

This helped a lot for OS updates, just update 1 and DRBL the rest. Or when the antivirus decided to delete system files and we could just reimage them from the VM's latest image.