Clonezilla USB boot issue solved
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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steven_shiau
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I ran across an issue with writing the current version of the clonezilla iso (2.2.3-25) to a USB stick which causes it to be non-bootable on a non-UEFI system. This problem occurs when writing the clonezilla image to a USB stick formated with a FAT32 (or NTFS) partition.
The symptoms are that you will get the splash screen, but not be to boot the clonezilla image as it will likely hang and complain about being unable to find or load the linux system image.
The cause is that the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file references the following:
configfile /EFI/boot/grub.cfg
On the USB stick the /EFI subdirectory was written in the FAT32 partition as /efi. (this was done by both tuxboot and unetbootin in my tests.)
Since the linux system image considers the difference in letter case to be significant, it considers /EFI to be different than /efi. This causes grub to be unable to load the linux system image.
The quick solution is to use either parted or gparted to repartition the USB stick as an ext3 parition before writing an image to it.
BTW: This problem may also exist on UEFI boots with FAT32 formatted USB sticks as well, but I haven't tested it there.
Hopefully this will save others a bit of work....
cheers,
bill
Last edit: Bill Weinel 2014-07-18
Thanks for sharing that.
However, we could not reproduce the issue here. We always use FAT32 as the file system for our USB flash drive, and it boots well both on legacy BIOS and uEFI BIOS. Actually for FAT the uppercase or lowercase should be the same. Therefore it's really weird there.
Steven.