Restore FAT partition results in empty /unbootable partition
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#125 Restore FAT partition results in empty /unbootable partition
I created a backup of a disk with clonezilla (one for a 40 gig one for a 80 gig, with each a 1 gig FAT32 and a RAW partition) and wanted to restore them now on a 160 gig disk.
Both failed to restore the FAT partition.
The restore process seemed to pass successfully (I don't see any error message), but after mounting the partition is empty!
When I try to call dosfsck to check the file system it tells me that there are unclaimed clusters and wants to free them.
When I try to "dd" the whole source disk to the target disk (I just tried it with my disks) it is fine and everything works. But this is not possible for my colleagues who had the damaged disk but the backup. And the backup / restore as described above fails for my disks as well.
I also tried to use the expert mode but I didn't find any useful switches here. Please help me to restore the data! I only have the 160 gig disks available and I don't see any reasons why the recovery should not work :-)
I tried two versions for restoring the backup - one was the latest version, one is a bit older (from 2008 I think).
And another way that didn't work as expected:
I dd'ed the 80 gig to 160 gig without any problems, the target system worked well
I backuped this 160 gig with defaults (beginner mode) and restored to another 160 gig blank disk
The files looked fine but the disk did not boot (syslinux boot error)
I issued a syslinux /dev/sda1 to the boot partition and it booted!
So something works, but my expectation would be that the target disk should boot directly without any errors and without further hackings on syslinux.
In the expert mode, did you try to check the option "-fsck-src-part"?
Maybe that helps.
Steven.
Result: partly success
I tried to add the fsck-option in expert mode, it started but failed to backup the raw partitions because no repair was possible (and I don't want that).
So the first partition was fsck'ed and then I tried to create the backup again with defaults in the beginner mode. That worked and the restore of this image worked as well and the new disk booted successfully!!
BUT - my colleague is still unhappy because the restore is still not possible and there is no other backup possibility - the source disk is dead and the only backup was the one that resulted into the non-bootable disk.
What to do now?
Best regards,
Erik
I just tried the following:
manual dosfsck /dev/sda1 on my 40 Gig source disk. The disk reported no errors.
I backuped the 40 Gig without any error and restored it on a 160 Gig dd-zeroed disk /dev/sdb). The result was that /dev/sdb1 was empty! No error was reported!
So what to do now? :-(
If there are no sensitive data on your image, could you please share that so we can test it?
Thanks.
Steven.