Cloning My Batocera HDD 500:GB

peterp

Hi all,

Please, please please can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I have setup Batocera on I3 PC running ONLY batocera and no other OS!

I've got the system to a point where I want to share it with a friend of mine, but cannot work out how to clone the HDD to another HDD. I've used a number windows apps and even tried Clonezilla. All the windows app were no good for me as I only have power on my motherboard to power 2 HDD at the same time. So having Windows running is not an option.

Clonezilla seemed perfect has it runs a limited OS from a USB stick. I first tried to make a .ISO or .img file of my original HDD with Clonezilla, but It seem to just create the backup copy of the drive without partition information.

Next I tried the Clone option within Clonezilla and this did clone my drive with partitions, but the new HDD is missing the bootloader (or something) as I cannot boot from the drive. The drives looks the same when viewed in Windows disk mgt. Why is the new HDD not bootable???? Help

Please can anyone point me in a how-to guide for cloning or making copies of the worked on batocera system. I losing the will to live on this one.

Thanks PP

joinski

peterp

You don't need to use Clonezilla.
If you have a seperated PC running windows for example, then you could just plug the second HDD to this system (internally or externally via SATA USB-Adapter for example) and just flash the downloaded batocera image onto this HDD via Etcher.
Then plug this HDD to the second PC and boot from it. After that you can just transfer all folders from the /share/ directory from the first PC with Batocera to the second PC with Batocera via Network (all 3 PCs have to be connected to the same network)

peterp

Thanks so much for coming back to me, I have a separate PC and thought about this but there's quite a few hours of work involved reconfiguring it and copying the data back/bios etc. The drive contains my N64/Playstation/Arcade ROMS and with the current situation want to share an exact clone of my drive so I can share the same set-up I had. My drive took 6 hours to configure so I just want an exact image of it/clone to put onto a drive to pass to friends. When I try to do this, it clones, looks identical - just won't boot? :( If I follow your advice above it will be six hours of work for me opposed to one hour-ish of copying time so looking to reduce time and workload! I could also use any copies as a back up incase my drive breaks which would be useful? Thanks and hopefully I have explained that so it makes sense!!

joinski

peterp

I made good experience with EaseUS Disk Copy in the past (it is some years ago, that i had to do an exact 1 to 1 copy of one of my hard-disks).
So you could give this tool a try?
A good tutorial on how to use EaseUS Disk Copy, that i found on the quick:

peterp

Thanks for this. Unfortunately, EaseUs have changed the software since that video and the free version does not allow USB-Key to be built. :( (Or I could not find the correct version, they have a lot) I did find a copy of EaseUs Partition master, that did allow me to make a USB-Key, but it was a WINPE key and the clone did not work after waiting 5 hours to complete. :(

Then I had an idea.....

1) Boot into Batocera
2) Use the "Install to Disk" option within Batocera to install to my second disk. (thus giving me a bootable partition)
2a) You must boot the newly installed disk, as Batocera needs to do some auto disk setup of its own.
3 Use AOMEI Backupper Std to clone the data partiton of my original HDD (With Roms/BIOS) to the second HDD data partition. This took 2 hours to complete and did not work either!! :(
4) Tried using Clonezilla to do the same job (copy data partitions) AND IT WORKED!!!!

Do you think it would be worth me writing a how-to for this, to help other in the future?

Let me know and thanks for your help.

peterp

p.s clonezilla only took 12mins to clone the data partition. 😀