My system disk is failing, multiple sector read errors. For now OMV is still performing as expected. However, replacing the system disk sooner rather than later should minimise disruption.
I have used Clonezilla through OMV backup tab to create images, both disk and partition. My replacement disk is a few Gb smaller in size and I am facing the "restore to smaller disc" problem that seems to be a part of living with Clonezilla.
In an attempt to get around the smaller disk problem I resized the failing system disk with GParted to a size smaller than the new disk. Then I made new images from the resized system disk, both disk and partition images. I am still unable to restore to the new disk.
What seems to be happening is that every attempt to restore ends the same way with a message that the destination is smaller than the source. It looks as if the image always has the size of the source disk rather than the size of the source partition. It does not seem to matter whether the image is created as disk or partition. The expert flag to skip checking of destination disk size seems to have no effect.
I am very much a novice in linux systems and have researched and tried many, many variations of restore with Clonezilla, so far without success. At this stage I resist the temptation to dump large volumes of log files, error messages and the like. If there is a detailed guide fine, a link would be nice. I won't learn if I'm spoon fed and I want to figure my the restore out but I do need a pointer (or two).
Question(s): When restoring a partition image must the destination disk already contain a partition that exactly matches the imaged partition? If yes, is there a way to copy partition data from one disk to a new disk or should I create the target structure with GParted.
Thanks