Cloned Linux does not recognize the new flash drive's space?

Question

I installed CentOS 6 into my 4GB flash drive, and everything worked fine until I needed more space. I have another flash drive with 8GB of space (which is all I really need) and so I formatted it with gparted to ext4. Once it was done formatting I went into the Terminal and put this command:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=512 conv=noerror,sync

Up to this point everything worked correctly, and once the command was finished (took less than an hour), I went ahead and rebooted, removing my old flash drive. Once it booted in with the new flash drive I was extremely happy that everything worked flawlessly until I went to install some packages with YUM, and I only have 12.5 MB of free space remaining!

I went back into gparted and this is the "screen shot" of it:

I am assuming that I somehow need to extend one of the partions and remove the unallocated, but I don't know how. Any help is appreciated, thank you!

Answer 1

There is a much easier solution to your problem, i.e. use Clonezilla. Clonezilla is a free program for disk cloning and data recovery; you find a very detailed account of how to do it here. The advantage of this method is that you can circumvent the need of a third medium (USB/DVD) which seems instead to emerge from the previous comments.

Since you cannot use the disks you wish to use, but you also need to use a medium to host Clonezilla, it appears you need three media. However, the reference above instructs on how to mount Clonezilla on the empty new, large disk, boot from it thanks to Clonezilla, then load all of Clonezilla into RAM so that disk space on the new medium can be freed, and used to clone the smaller disk onto the larger one, in the meantime enlarging the partitions as you wish.

The instructions above are very detailed. Notice, though, that when you are offered the option Beginner/Expert, you must choose Expert because:

By deafult, Clonezilla will clone the "same" size of source disk to target disk. i.e. in this example, only 8 GB will be cloned to target disk, so the rest of 12 GB on the destination disk will be unallocated. If you want to make use all of the target disk size, remember to enter "Expert" mode and choose option "-k1".

That's really all there is to it. But remember: with a target disk size of 1T, it will take you several hours.