Clonezilla Live CD via PXE
A simple documentation to quickly setup up Clonezilla on a PXE server.
What is Clonezilla
Clonezilla is a partition or disk clone software similar to Ghost. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive.
Features of Clonezilla
- Free (GPL) Software.
- Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of M$ Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux or M$ windows. For other file system, Clonezilla uses dd to dump the whole partition.
- LVM2 under GNU/Linux is supported.
- Based on Partimage, ntfsclone and dd to clone partition. However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
- If file system is supported (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, fat, ntfs), only used blocks in harddisk are saved and restored. This increase the clone efficiency. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
1. Requirements:
- A working DHCP, PXE, TFTP, and NFS server
- Clonezilla LiveCD
2. References:
Clonezilla: http://www.clonezilla.org/
Clonezilla LiveCD Download: http://www.clonezilla.org/download/sourceforge/
3. NFS Server Config:
Setup directories
mkdir -p /mnt/isoimage mkdir -p /exports/clonezilla
Download the clonezilla-live-$LATESTVERSION.iso to /tmp
Mount the iso image and copy contents to the export directory.
mount -o loop /tmp/clonezilla-live-$LATESTVERSION.iso /mnt/isoimage cp -a /mnt/isoimage/. /exports/clonezilla umount /mnt/isoimage
Restart NFS
add /exports/clonezilla *(ro,sync) /etc/exports service nfs restart exportfs -ra
4. Tftp Server Config:
Setup directories
mkdir -p /tmp/clonezilla mkdir /mnt/isoimage mkdir /tftpboot/images/clonezilla/
Mount the Clonezilla iso image and copy the boot files to the clonzilla tftp server directory.
mount -o loop clonezilla-live-$LATESTVERSION.iso /mnt/isoimage cp /mnt/isoimage/casper/initrd1.img /tftpboot/images/clonezilla/initrd.gz cp /mnt/isoimage/casper/vmlinuz1 /tftpboot/images/clonezilla/vmlinuz umount /mnt/isoimage
PXE menu entry
MENU DEFAULT MENU LABEL Clonezilla live label clonezilla kernel images/clonezilla/vmlinuz # Older Clonezilla # append initrd=images/clonezilla/initrd.gz boot=casper netboot nfsroot=$NFSSERVER:$NFSEXPORT # Clonezilla 1.1.0-8 append initrd=images/clonezilla/initrd.gz boot=live union=aufs netboot=nfs nfsroot=$NFSSERVER:$NFSEXPORT