Help with CloneZilla and laptop

[Cobra26]

Hi all,

I wondered if it is possible when i purchase an Asus X73SD-TY085V laptop.
It comes with an 320gb hdd, with windows 7 installed. Thing is i don't like microsoft. I rather use linux ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Here is what i plan to do use clonezilla to make an image of the existing hdd with w7 and store it to an external hdd.

After that a complete install of ubuntu 12.04 LTS. But for whatever reason i need to make a claim to my warranty and i don't want any problems because they tell me sorry won't help you since you use another OS.

Is it possible to restore the W7 with the clone/image i made and stored on an external hdd?? So to have a working hdd with w7 on it again?

Next question the hdd is 320gb will the cloning/image also be 320gb when using clonezilla? Kind of a waste when you clone/image 320gb knowing you didn't used all the remaining gb on your drive...and yes i need to make a complete copy of the w7 hdd. If thats the case il need to buy myself a 2TB external hdd.

I also contemplated the idea to purchase a separate 2.5inch hdd to replace the w7 hdd and install linux ubuntu, if i have problems i just switch back to the hdd with w7 will this work ie will the laptop recognise this? But this seems to be to much work...

Please share your feedback/help,
Thanks in advance

 

[RainMotorsports]

If its a Seagate hard drive just use their tool which is based on Acronis. I keep a backup of the restore partition of my ASUS recovery partition as well as various states of install.

If you do an exact copy bit for bit it will be the same size as the drive with no compression. If you do compression all the empty space will not be accounted for and it will also shrink a little bit. In Acronis/Seagate Disk Wizard you can also do it not bit for bit just data on the drive and it will be smaller than the drive even with out compression. My backups stock and with some software are 11 and 32 gb respectively.

Not sure about this clonezilla but with the seagate discwizard you need atleast a seperate partition to write the file to or an external drive preferably. It boots with a CD pretty easy to handle and may or may not allow writing it to a USB drive (16GB should do the trick hopefully).

 

[Kougar]

Firstly, yes it's possible to do that. And it's a really good idea to do.

I haven't used Clonezilla, but it should depend on how you make the image. It would only be 320GB if you do a sector-by-sector image. Acronis (and I presume most other tools at this point) will only make the image as large as it needs to be while removing zero space.