Category: Notepad++

Clonezilla – identify original disk size of clone .img image by looking at flat files

How to find the original HDD hard drive disk size in a Clonezilla img image file

So if you’re a fan of Clonezilla like I am, you may have a library of .img images in a file share somewhere. I find that when taking an image of a system, it’s best to name the image/file with something descriptive such as (Win7-64-Optiplex7040-500GB-Date-img). But what happens if you want to restore data from an image onto a new hard drive, but you can’t remember, or didn’t write down the size of the disk that it originally was imaged from? As you may already know, Clonezilla doesn’t like to be restored onto disks smaller than the original disk on which it originated. There are some advanced options when saving a Disk-to-image in clonezilla, or Image-to-Disk, however I haven’t found a reliable way to restore an image to a smaller disk drive.

In the event you have an old image, but you’re not sure what size disk it came from originally, and you didn’t name your file with the original disk size, there is a way how to find the original disk size using the flat files that clonezilla creates when taking the image.  To do this, go into the img folder, look for a file named sda-pt.parted.compact and open it with a text editor such as NotePad++.

This file will contain everything you need to know to determine the original size of a HDD that existed in the computer before you took the copy of the clone. For example, here is the contents of the file highlighted above:

Model: ATA WDC WD2500AAJS-7 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  106MB  105MB  primary  ntfs         boot
 2      106MB   250GB  250GB  primary  ntfs

As you can see we get a Model number, Manufacturer, disk size, partition sizes and file-system type.

I haven’t had trouble restoring Clonezilla images to different manufacturers of hard drives as long as the new drive is larger than the original drive. Also, I find that it’s invaluable to have at least a gigabit connection between the machine you’re trying to clone and the file share where you’re saving the img file.