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I have a Dell laptop that runs Windows 10. I also have an empty partition on this laptop's HDD that I want to install Ubuntu there and use it as a dual boot machine.
In addition I have Lenovo laptop with Ubuntu on it.
I want to clone my Lenovo machine and install this image on the Dell free partition.
I found the clonezilla app to clone my Lenovo machine but also read that I need the target disk to be exactly (or more) the size of the original disk.
Does anyone knows if it possible to clone my Lenovo machine and install it on the free partition on my Dell's HDD?

Alon Zahavi
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  • If you don't clone the disk but make an image of the partitions you need, you should be able to do restore that as well on less disk space than the original, but you need a third medium to temporarily store the image. And you will need to manually install GRUB or use boot-repair afterwards. – Byte Commander Feb 12 '18 at 10:27
  • I would recommend a fresh installation instead of a cloned copy. You can install new programs when you need them, and you can copy the personal files that you want from the old to the new system. – sudodus Feb 12 '18 at 10:34
  • @sudodus I need a specific kernel version and I already had a lot of problems trying to change kernel versions on other machines I have. Moreover, I have quite a lot configurations and apps to move to the new partition. – Alon Zahavi Feb 12 '18 at 10:38
  • @ByteCommander So if I had an image from my Lenovo machine, I should be able to install it on my free Dell's partition using BIOS? – Alon Zahavi Feb 12 '18 at 10:40
  • Clonezilla should be able to do that, yes. Just pay attention not to accidentally overwrite any existing partitions and you should be good. And as I said, you will have to (re)install the GRUB boot loader manually afterwards. – Byte Commander Feb 12 '18 at 10:42
  • @ByteCommander Would I be able to use both of the OSs only if I install GRUB, or it will just be easier? Do you have any tutorial on how I can do it? – Alon Zahavi Feb 12 '18 at 10:45
  • You must install GRUB to be able to boot Ubuntu. Windows' bootloader will not care about it. See https://askubuntu.com/q/88384/367990 on how to do it. – Byte Commander Feb 12 '18 at 11:00
  • @ByteCommander Can you write all of this as an Answer so I would approve this? – Alon Zahavi Feb 12 '18 at 11:02
  • No, sorry, I was wrong. The Clonezilla FAQ states that it can't easily restore images onto smaller partitions than the source. https://drbl.org/faq/fine-print.php?path=./2_System/26_large_disk_to_small_one.faq#26_large_disk_to_small_one.faq :-/ – Byte Commander Feb 12 '18 at 11:11
  • I see why you want to clone. Let us hope that you can make it work. An alternative to cloning the partition is to copy the whole root file system with rsync when booted from another drive, for example a live drive, for example something like sudo rsync -Hav path-to-source-partition/ path-to-target-partition and after that make the UUID match the content of /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.cfg and also install the grub bootloader. (You may need a swap partition too.) This should work, if there is space enough in the target partition for all the directories and files. – sudodus Feb 12 '18 at 12:24

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