Manually Restore a Clonezilla Image When Destination Partition is Smaller than the Original

Today I ran into some problems with a hard drive that failed in a machine and I needed to restore a Clonezilla image. Unfortunately, the destination partition happened to be smaller than the original image so I couldn’t use the wizard because it errored out claiming I needed to use the -C option. The only problem is that from within the wizard you don’t even have the option to use it. After some searching, I found a few sites that said to use partclone.restore -C -s – -o /dev/(path to partition) and that failed everytime but at least pointed me in the right direction. To make a long story short, here’s a lil’ somethin’ somethin’ that should accomplish our end goal. From the shell, do one of the following:

sudo cat /home/partimage/(path to original .gz files).* | sudo gzip -d -c | sudo dd of=/dev/(path to partition)

Or if you want to store it to an image file (just make sure destination has enough space):

sudo cat /home/partimage/(path to original .gz files).* | sudo gzip -d -c | sudo dd of=backup.img

To restore an image:
sudo dd if=backup.img of=/dev/(partition)

The only downside that I noticed was that there was no progress indicator so you have to be patient. Obviously, I take no responsibility for any of the following situations: You format the wrong drive, a four and a half foot penguin man bites off your nose , Obama takes your guns.

One Reply to “Manually Restore a Clonezilla Image When Destination Partition is Smaller than the Original”

  1. I re-visited this issue the other day and found that the information in the post wasn’t complete but I haven’t had the chance to edit the post yet. I failed to mention that you will need to use GParted to shrink partition to an equal or lesser value than the destination partition for this to work.

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