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#195 Backing disk LVM disk without Partition Table

stable_clonezilla_live
open
Steven Shiau
lvm (1)
5
2017-11-26
2014-04-04
makefu
No

Hi,

we want to use Clonezilla for creating images of systems which are using LVM for Disk Management.
The first disk has a Partition table and therefore sda1-2 are available, however the second disk is directly partitioned as a physical volume without a partition table.

Backing of the first disk works flawlessly but backing and restoring the second disk does not work. When running in ocs-sr from the shell the following error appears when running.

ocs-sr savedisk <diskname> sdb
...
Selected device [sdb] found!
....
The data partition to be saved:
The swap partition to be saved:
Activating the partition info in /proc... done!
<red>No input device!</red>

Running 'saveparts' results in the following error:

ocs-sr saveparts sdb
...
<red>The partition table in this disk is illegal/invalid: /dev/sdb
It's not supported by parted. Parted is used in Clonezilla to parse the filesystem in the partition table. The partition table is detected as WRONG by parted!</red>
The error messages from parted are:
********.
Error: /dev/vdb: unrecognized disk label.********.
<orange>If you contine, something strange might happen (e.g. dd is used, not partimage or ntfsclone, to save the supported file system), and the disk image you saved maybe no be complete!</orange>
Are you sure you want to continue? (y/N) y
Very bad choice.
OK, let's do it!
Reading partition table of /dev/sdb....RETVAL=0
<red>Unknown partition table format on disk /dev/sdb</red>
Program terminated!!

How to reproduce:

create a virtual machine with one additional disk which will be partitoned as follows:

pvcreate /dev/sdb
vgcreate lv1_vg1 /dev/sdb
lvcreate lv1_vg1 -l 100%FREE -n data
mkfs.ext3 /dev/lv1_vg1/data
mount /dev/lv1_vg1/data /mnt
truncate --size 1MB /mnt/1mb.blob

I tested with the most current version of Clonezilla Debian as well as Ubuntu.
Is there a way to backup this partition without the need for a manual workaround?

Regards

Discussion

  • Steven Shiau

    Steven Shiau - 2014-04-08
    • assigned_to: Steven Shiau
     

  • Steven Shiau

    Steven Shiau - 2014-04-08

    Thanks for the bug report. Yes, this is still in our todo list.

    Steven.

     

  • Borksoft

    Borksoft - 2015-01-13

    Is there an update to this issue? We are also running into this problem, as we want to backup a disk without a partition table.

     

  • Steven Shiau

    Steven Shiau - 2015-01-17

    Yes, it should be ready in Clonezilla live version >=
    20150113-utopic, 20150113-vivid or 2.3.2-7 on
    http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
    Please give it a try and let us know the results.
    //NOTE// Backup important data before you use Clonezilla. Just in case.

    Steven.

     

    • Borksoft

      Borksoft - 2015-01-30

      Steven,

      I tried this and it did not work. What we did is just write random data to the first MB of a disk and then try to back up this disk. We are still getting the "No input device" message.

      I looked into the code, and I saw this comment in the function task_savedisk:

      # We need the partition table to conver the selected HD to partitions.

      As we do not have a partition table the generated list will be empty.
      The call later to task_saveparts in this function will have an empty 2nd parameter, so that is why the "No input device" message is generated.

      One thing that could be done is have an additional check on the number of found partitions before calling task_saveparts. If no partitions are found just a plain dd-command could be executed instead of using task_saveparts.

       

  • Borksoft

    Borksoft - 2015-02-02

    Steven,

    Some other remarks on the code of task_savedisk: When looking at the output I noticed that the output lines "The data partition to be saved" and "The swap partition to be saved" were printed, even when the variables were empty (lines 7090/7091 of ocs-functions). When looking at this code I noticed that the variables were not empty but contained a single space character. To fix this the following lines could be added before these lines:

    target_parts=`echo $target_parts|sed "s/^  *$//"`
target_swap_parts=`echo $target_swap_parts|sed "s/^  *$//"`

    Now the -z check could also be used to check if no partitions are found.

     

  • Steven Shiau

    Steven Shiau - 2015-02-11

    Thanks. It's fixed in clonezilla deb/rpm 3.13.28.

    Steven.

     

  • Skonvols2k

    Skonvols2k - 2017-10-23

    Hi,
    i have the same problem of cloning lvm disk without partition, using latest testing 20171019-artful.
    Any news about this bug?
    Thanks

     

  • Steven Shiau

    Steven Shiau - 2017-10-29

    Please provide more info so that we can reproduce the issue. You can provide the partition table, the config file saved by vgcfgbackup, and more as you can.

    Steven

     

  • Skonvols2k

    Skonvols2k - 2017-10-29

    Hi,
    you can reproduce the issue adding a disk to any linux distribution supporting lvm2, let's suppose you add "sdb" and "sda" it's your normally installed system with sda1 for /boot and sda2 for / (as lvm or not).
    Then make sdb a physical volume with the command: pvcreate /dev/sdb without any partitions.
    Now you can create a virtual group on it vgcreate vgtest /dev/sdb and a logical volume: lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n lvtest vgtest. Finally make a filesystem on it: mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vgtest-lvtest and mount it to write some files on its. When you boot with clonezilla live this system you will able to select only sda on the list, sdb will be not listed at all.

    Since this way of doing pv is perfectly supported by lvm2, IMHO should be fixed in clonezilla.
    Thanks

     

  • Steven Shiau

    Steven Shiau - 2017-11-26

    OK, thanks. Will try to fix this. Patches are welcome. Thanks.

    Steven

     

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