#144 Console too wide and mysterious sda and sdb name changing

[cj1901]

I want to report a successful first expierence using Clonezilla to backup and restore a failing system hard drive on a RHEL5 workstation.

BUT, in the process, I ran into what surely seemed like a couple bugs. First, I tested Clonezilla on an old PC with a 4:3 screen running windows using the 32-bit Clonezilla Live CD-ROM (0120127-oneiric). This was NOT a good experience! Every Clonezilla message/query was cut off on the left side, because the console window only displayed 80 characters amd Clonezilla used more like 120 characters per line. Steven, what about us folk who still have old 4:3 LCDs or monitors? I couldn't find any way to change the screen size. The only thing I saw was where Steven posted that you can direct all output to a file and then view it with more (by moving back and forth with the cursor I guess). That sounded absolutely terrible, so that officially ended my experience with any of the Clonezilla ISOs.

Luckly, I spotted someone's comment about how they preferred to use Clonezilla on the Parted Magic CD-ROM/USB stick. Yeah, so I went this route. Parted Magic seemed to be a HUGE step up in ease and convenience over the Clonezilla ISOs. I'm wondering why your even bothering to do Clonezilla-only ISOs, when the tool is so much better when packaged with a more complete unix, partitioning tools, networking tools, other backup/restore tools and running on X-windows where the messages don't get cut off 4:3 monitors?

Anyway, here comes this next big shock... I knew my RHEL5 had problems with what it recognized as "sda". (In particular, the drive was always detected by the native OS, but it was often getting bad blocks that needed to be repaired.) When when I want to back up sda, somehow, it had become sdb. For example, first I tried to use Clonezilla (run off the Parted Magic CD-ROM) to backup sda, and it started doing all the backups for the WRONG DRIVE. I believe the drive it was backing up at that point was called sde according the the native RHEL5. (Note that my nave OS is RHEL5 running on a Dell T7500 with 5 identical drives on SATA hooked up on the 3 internal SATA controllers (SATA0, SATA1, and SATA2) and using the 5 SATA ports on the T7500's motherboard.) Also, this machine is NOT configured for RAID (neither hardware RAID from Dell NOR software RAID from RHEL5). A Dell, who replaced the drive, did tell me that some of the parts are designed for RAID even if they are used used for them. I'm not sure what that means, but I will pass it along nevertheless.

Anyway, I realized that when I selected to back up "sdb", then, in fact, I did backup what the native RHEL5 called sda. (So I backup the correct stuff, but the backup imaged used the sdb prefix on the files rather than sda.) That left me somewhat bewildered, but I hoped that (for the sake of sanity) that, at the time of the restore, Clonezilla off Parted Magic CD-ROM would again recognized my new hard drive as sdb and I could restore my image (using the sdb name) to the sdb drive, and only when I rebooted to the native RHEL5 would this be recognized this drivae as sda.

NO. NO, that hope was too simple. In fact, after putting the new pre-formated Seagate baracuda drive, Clonezilla recognized THIS drive as sda instead of sdb. And now it warned me that I was (daringly) preparing to restore a saved copy of "sdb" files to "sda". In particular, I got the warning message:

Creating a tmp Clonezilla iamge "...sdb...-img-tmp-cnvted" based on the image "...sdb...-img" so that we can restore the iamge ...sdb..-img (was saved from sdb) to sda... Note that you might nave to modify /etc/fstab and grub config file.

I took hope in the word "might" just above and figured that (despite all the confusing name changing) that Clonezilla faithfully saved what my RHEL5 system called sda as "sdb" files , and would faithfully restore them from "sdb" files as what was now (for no apparanet reason) is called sda (wihtout altering them) and that this warning meant to say that any actual altering of the files was up to me and (according to my logic) was NOT required.

Wtih considerably doubt, I proceeded with the restore. Well, thanks again! Clonezilla DID perform as I hoped. Everthing was restored beautifilly and my RHEL5 machine booted perfectly.

My question is: What the heck just happened?

Is it really going to be that confusing to use Clonezilla to backup and restore one hard drive on a RHEL5 system with five hard-drives and no raid. Did clonezilla get confused by the Dell hardware in this T7500? How do you know that the linux on the Clonezilla CD-ROMs or the Parted Magic CD-ROMs will see the same devices with the same names as the native OS does? Is this a common problem. Maybe I was wrong to expect this, and it will always be a deep mystery until I look at other details from the disk say coming from "fdisk -l" or "echo /procs/partions". Did Clonezilla get confused about he use logical volume managment (LMV)? (My RHEL5 system is definitely using LMV including the desk that I just backuped and restored.) As I understand it, LMV is now somewhat supported in the sense that you can restore logical volumes as part of a whole disk or a whole partition, right? And, I guess, copy LMVs sare part of a whole disk or whole partition copy.

So, in total, I am very thankful to Clonezilla for being a helpful machine saving and restoring tool! Yet I want MORE... I want to have a smoother experinece with Clonezilla on RHEL machines. I have to say that I won't try the clonezilla ISOs anymore, because it don't really see the point of them. And is there a way to use the Clonzezilla from the Parted Magic that won't make such a confusing mismatch of my drive names? Ideally, I would kike to see the drive names in Clonezilla exactly as they appear to the native OS (be it Linux, windows or Mac) from start to finish. (Is that request conflicting with how Parted Magic is working???? Or, is that requestion somehow otherwise asking too much? If your answer is that "This is already what Clonezilla does.", then my follow-up question quetsion is "Why did I not have that experience with Clonezilla?" and, in particular, "What did I do wrong?" (I'm happy to admit user error, if you can tell me exactly what I did wrong.)

Okay, thanks in advance for answering my questions on Clonezilla!

CJ

[cj1901]

I have an update for my problem above.

I realized that the trouble I had with "sda" and "sdb" switching was likely caused by the fact that Dell computer build our T7500 work station to with 4 of the 5 SATA hard drives located on the HDD0 to HDD3 ports on the motherboard (in one bank) and the fifth drive connected in on of the SATA0 to SATA2 ports on the motherboard. Please google the motherboard of the Dell T7500 to see this.

My guess is that have 5 SATA hard drives on this machine (which Dell supports BTW) left it up to the flavor of Linux that is running to decide how to letter the ONE drive on SATA0-2 bank with respect to the FOUR drives on HDD0-3 bank. In particular, we observed that RHEL5 will label the FOUR drives on HDD0-3 as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, and /dev/sdd. Finally, it labels the last drive on SATA0-2 as /dev/sde.

This was NOT how the Debian Linux that came on the "Parted Magic" CD-ROM labeled the drives. (I have no idea what Ubuntu would do.) I believe the Debian Linux labed the FOUR drives in HDD0-3 as /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc/, /dev/sdd, and /dev/sde, and the ONE drives in SATA0-2 as /dev/sda.

So even though we were very careful to avoid ever switch the drives or cables as part of the hard drive replacement, our backup software saw the bad drive as /dev/sdb even thought the native OS called this drive /dev/sda.

Finally, my antipation was somewhat sensible that "Parted Magic" should have seen the new replacement hard drive as /dev/sdb during the restore, BUT, in fact, I did NOT actually do what I did during the restore. Instead, I was, at that point, worried about writing the data to the wrong drive, and I disonnected all drives EXCEPT the new hard drive which was located in port HDD0 of the T7500's motherboard. As a result of this action, the Debian linux on the "Parted Magic" CD-ROM only saw one hard drive in all ports on the machine, and it, of course, lettered this as /dev/sda.

So here's what I learned....

1. Don't blame Clonezilla for anything except written messages longer than 80 columns. This is my only actual bug to report, so please just fix that issue.

2. Don't ever put 5 drives in a single workstation. I didn't buy this machine. What a head-ache!

3. If you do have drives connecting to different "banks" of SATA ports on the motherboard, then you should expect the possibility of confusing switches in the names as you go between the native OS and the backup OS.

4. If issue #3 drives you nuts, then you might want start by disconnecting any drives in the less occupied bank (espectially if you didn't need to back that drive up), then do your backup and restores with all dries in a single bank. I'm thinking this stategy should allow the backup software letter to perfectly match the native OS letter. Am I correct about this???? (I hope so.)

Anyway, it also makes me wonder if the Dell is making a poor choice by selling people work stations with 5 drives, since this spills over the HDD0-HDD3 bank. They could have saved me a lot of confusion by just limiting the number drives on the T7500 to 4 instead of 5!

Finally, yeah, just please limit the messages to 80 columns, so people can use Clonezilla on the console of a 4:3 screen if they ever need to. Yeah, of couse, I normally use 16:9 screens, but occasionally I don't. A lot of us don't on occasion. That shouldn't mean that you can read the mesages, and if you are just learnign the tool it's a huge issue.

[Steven Shiau]

That's weird... Some of my machines are 4:3 screen, and I can use Clonezilla live without any problem. Could you please take a photo and show us?
Thanks.

Steven.

[cj1901]

Thanks for your reponse Steve. Sorry, I don't have a camera. But here's what I did to help you:

1. I retested the same CD-ROM that caused me trouble before. Yeah, I get the same problem.
2. Here's the name of the ISO file, I used to burn that CD-ROM: clonezilla-live-20120127-oneiric.iso
3. Here's the machine type that I ran into trouble: HP/Compaq dc7100 with 4:3 Compaq monitor and old dedicated graphics card on an AGP port.
4. Here's where the problem of text beeing too wide occurs:
a. NOT on the initial screen where you can select the resolution. I used 800x600, but also tried all other options in regard to this problem. This first configuration screen was fine though.
b. NOT on the next screen to select language. That also fit fine. I chose en_US.UTF-8 English.
c. NOT on the "Configuring the console-data" screen. I chose "Don't touch keymap".
d. Hmm, already (after I pressed "Enter" after highlighting "Don't touch keymap" I saw what appeared to be trouble. It looked like the keymapping operation flashed to the screen to the LEFT of what my 4:3 Compaq montior could show (since it was BELOW the purple color background).
e. No the "Start Clonezilla" page looks okay and fits on the 4:3 screen. But AGAIN, after I prese enter to "Start Clonezilla" I see cut off text in the lower left the screen!!!!
f. Now the "Clonezilla" titled page is what I would like to photograph and attach for you if I could. Here is what I can read on the screen:

illa is free (GPL) software, and some wiht ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY*
t! From now on, if multiple choices are available, you have to press space key to mark
llection. An asterisk (*) will be shown when the selection is done///
des are available, you can
one/restore a disk or partioin using an image
sk to disk or partiion to partion clone/restore.
...

So, as you can see from what I've typed above, key parts of the left side of the screen are missing making the tool unusualble at this point to anyboy that don't know the tool by heart.

Even worse, all subsequent screen are similar cut off on the left and when you exit to shell, then the shell cursor is cut off, making it almost impossible to sensibly exit the tool (by doing a "sudo reboot").

Also, the title at the top of the screen is "Software Labs, Taiwan".

I'm guessing instead that there should be a name in front of "Software Labs, Taiwan", so this must also be cut off on the left.

Okay, hope this helps!

CJ

[Steven Shiau]

Did you try Clonezilla live 20120419-precise or 1.2.12-51?
Any difference?

Steven.