0 How to backup and recover broken hard drive

Clonezilla is great tool to do hard backup or recover broken hard drive. Clonezilla is based on Debian linux and is available to everyone with GPL licence.

Clonezilla currently supports ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows and Intel-based Mac OS, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. 

For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.


1. Get Clonezilla live CD (http://clonezilla.org/) and boot your computer using it

2.  Choose language when prompted

3.  Choose keyboard layout and select: Don't touch keymap if you are using US keyboard and select keymap  from arch list if you use other keyboard

4. Choose start clonezilla

5. Choose which way you want to copy (Device to image) or (Device to device)

6. Choose (local_dev) as your image home

7. Plug in your external USB hdd or memorystick and wait for 5sec for linux to recognize plugged hardware

8. Select device that is used as image repository

9. Start in cloning either in Beginner or Expert mode (Beginner mode is recommenned)

10.  Select (restore disk) as your cloning mode

11. Select image name and target disk

12. Review your options and hit (enter) to start cloning

Article Source:

http://www.everything.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=7&Itemid=69