#288 Disk seen by live but Clonezilla doesn't let me choose it

[Riksoft]

clonezilla-live-2.5.2-31-amd64.iso
Computer with 4 sata disks, all ext4.

I choose to clone "partition to image".
When I get to the point where Clonezilla should show all the available targets for the image, It only shows the first 2 drives (sda and sdb), missing sdc and sdd.
However the live per se it's OK, infact, both fdisk -l and lsblk show the 4 drives/partitions.

The 2 disks that clonezilla sees are 2 WD Black 500GB, while the 2 it doesn't are HUA72302 (2TB each).
I don't reckon it's important, but the only "strange" things of these 2 drives is that I formatted them with the option "largefile4" because are for backup only. If I remember well I made it with:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc -L etichetta -O sparse_super,large_file -m 0 -T largefile4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0

[Steven Shiau]

Could you pelase give Clonezilla live 2.5.5-19 or 20180102-* a try?
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php

They come with newer Linux kernel and many changes so the results might be different.

Steven

[Riksoft]

I've just tried the 2.5.5-19 but same problem: the OS can see the disk but Clonezilla can't.

When I'm in the window "Every 3.0" (the window that shows the visible disks refreshing the list automatically), it really shows "sdc" (HUA72302) but as soon as I use CTRL-C getting back to the window that says "Now need to mount a device as /home/partimag", in such window sdc is not present.

I've tried rerun, I've tried with the disk turned on before the live started, I tried turning the disk on only in the "every 3.0" window (and again it appears properly but same result after the ctrl-c: not in the list).

Clonezilla is the only software in its live disk that doesn't see my sdc.
fdisk, every, lsblk, mounting manually, everything works fine but Clonezilla.

[Steven Shiau]

Please run the following commands and show us the results:
1. cat /proc/partitions
2. lsblk

Thanks.

Steven

[Riksoft]

Trying Timeshift it says "selected device doesn't have a linux partition", so I realized what's going on: my backup drives have been formatted with
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc -L etichetta -O sparse_super,large_file -m 0 -T largefile4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0

This command does not create the partition table (plus, uses less inodes). This gives me 100GB more than the standard format. However Timeshift and Clonezilla doesn't like the lack of partition table and that's the problem.

[Riksoft]

I've created the partition table and now anything is fine. :-)
Maybe could be an improvement for the future: since Linux has no problem to work with a drive without partition table, could be useful to have Clonezilla doing the same.

[Steven Shiau]

Sure. It's done in Clonezilla live >= 2.5.5-21 or 20180109-*:
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
If you have a chance, give it a try and let us know the results. Thanks.

Steven