Just the other day, I was trying to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 on one of my virtual machines and the reason why it failed was because I had ran out of hard drive space. I thought 5 GB for XP would be enough, especially for XP, but I guess not. Since I can’t change the space of the current drive for the virtual machine, I would have to create a new virtual drive with more space. That left me with 2 options. 1.) Start completely over with the installation of XP and get the virtual machine back to my “perfect state” or 2.) Find out a way to clone the current data onto the new virtual drive.

I decided that I was going to pick number 2, because number 1 is way too much work. The question was what software would I going to use to move that data. Well, I have used Norton Ghost before, and while it works and all, it requires installing onto the computer, which I didn’t want to do and also, creating an image. I don’t have the full version of Norton Ghost and I really didn’t want to install anything on the virtual machine, so I went on a search for something else and I found really good software that is exactly what I’m looking for.

Clonezilla is a cloning program for creating either an image of our hard drive or cloning the current drive onto another one. This software is free and open and can be burned using an ISO image onto a CD so that no installation on the current drive will occur. This software also clones hard drives and can transfer the image directly to a network drive! It’s not even that complicated to use. In fact, just looking at the video is all I needed to be able to work in the software. It cloned all my data from my current drive to my new one without messing anything up.

Try it for yourself and see how nice this software is.

By the way, here’s a post on how to increase the size of the partition.