Silly, mindboggling obvious virtualbox/clonezilla error

Chalk this up to a bit of overthinking, or ... something.

See, I have this USB external 2TB hard drive, and on it, I have clonezilla images. Since that's ample size, I decided that I'd conserve space and make VirtualBox VDIs from the images and store them on the same drive... yes, if you're playing along, you'll understand what happened.

It appears that VirtualBox removes the Host mounted drive and attaches it to the guest image. All of a sudden, I can't do anything to the VB VDI /dev/sda because ... it doesn't exist anymore, because the usb 2TB drive is mounted to the guest, removing the .vdi.

(In case you didn't catch this: Let's say the 2TB drive is mounted on Windows as L:, and the drive for the virtual machine is in L:\drive.vdi When VirtualBox runs, L: disappears as the 2TB drive is mounted for clonezilla recovery. Boom. L:\drive.vdi gone.)

Temp solution: put the .vdi on another drive until the images are converted, then move them back.

Changing hard drives with Clonezilla

For whatever it's worth, System Restore on Vista didn't know the "new" c: drive that I upgraded to, and system restore failed.

Right-click My Computer, Properties.
System Protection (left side)
Uncheck anything said as (Missing) and make certain C: that is (Local) is checked, apply, (yes) ok.

Now System Restore functions properly. Also, you can use this to put System Restore on an optional other disk.

Fun with Clonezilla

I had to resize my hard drive.

I used clonezilla to back up the partitions to an external USB Hard Drive. (Partition mode, not disk mode).

I then replaced the hard drive with a factory new one.

Clonezilla would not restore to the factory drive without partitions.

I used cfdisk to make partitions like the original hard drive (bigger, of course).

I restored clonezilla partitions to the new hard drive.

Windows didn't see the whole NTFS partition (dir said it was the same as the original. That's not what I wanted!). (Disk Management, yes, dir no).

I downloaded Easeus Partition Manager and SLIGHTLY decreased the partition (by about 10 MB). The large partition didn't miss the difference, but the entire space was now available when looking at "dir".

All this software was free, by the way.