no choice where to restore image
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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steven_shiau
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Trying to restore image (partitions) located on a usb drive to another usb drive.
But Clonezilla is not giving me any other option than the local hard drive in the computer.
I almost wiped out my entire hard drive with all my data.
This is a major fault in this software - very dangerous - and broken.
All drives are visible via fdisk -l.
Clonezilla needs to get the basics right before moving forward!
If all drivers are visible via fdisk -l, are they busy mounted?
If so, there is no way for clonezilla live to mount it again as image repository to save the image.
If you want to save the image on the Clonezilla live USB drive, please check here:
http://drbl.org/faq/fine-print.php?path=./2_System/120_image_repository_on_same_usb_stick.faq#120_image_repository_on_same_usb_stick.faq
Steven
Have you read my post?
I'm not saving an image, I'm trying to restore it.
RESTORE in image FROM a usb drive #1 TO a usb drive #2.
The usb drive #1 with my images gets recognized and selected as an image repository at Clonezilla start.
But the #2 usb drive is not selectable for image restoration to it.
Clonezilla automatically selects sda drive as a target without giving me any choice of other drives in the system.
This automatic selection of target drives to restore images to needs to stop and users need to be given a choice which drive to restore to.
And there is no reason for Clonezilla to be mouting any drives at all other than the image repo at start.
On second note
I've noticed improvement since the last June 2016 release I was using.
The September 2016 release does not suffer from the slowness when restoring an image.
On several computers the restore process would slow down to a crawl and take a 18 hours or more (even when it shoud've taken only couple hours at most).
The September release hasn't done that yet.
So good job on those improvements.
I've managed several successfull restores of images (multi partitions to an empty hard drive) and system booted and worked.
There are some weird things though in the restore screen but I'll start a new thread for those.
OK, I misread that. However, please be gentle in this forum, or otherwise no one will response with you.
People do this voluntarily, and you pay nonthing just time.
Anyway, back to your issue. It's very weird there since only one USB drive is found, and it's mounted as image repository. There is no way that Clonezilla will choose that as the destination disk because it's busy. It will just quit and show something like:
Excluding busy partition or disk...
Disk number: 0
Error! No existing disk(s) or no unmounted disk(s) are found! To use Clonezilla to save or clone a disk, the source disk must exist or be unmounted! If you are sure the disk exists in this machine, maybe the kernel is too old?
Press "Enter" to exit...
Therefore I am not sure where went wrong there.
Last edit: Steven Shiau 2016-10-15
Clonezilla is not presenting the destination drive to the user (whether restoring an image or cloning device to device).
It should always show clearly where it's going to write. Even if only one other drive is in the system.
I myself do not tolerate software that tries to make decisions for me, and removes me from the decision making process.
And the two confirmation prompts are only useful to diehard Linux users who can decipher the drive assignments.
Why not use ncurses interface with check-boxes instead of wall of gibberish text?
You use the ncurses for choosing partitions from an image.
When there are TWO or more devices, Clonezilla uses the checklist box of whiptail to let you choose the device. However, when there is only ONE, and by default TWO times of confirmation will prompt, then the only one device is selected. The flow is the best we can. Of course, we can just forget about that by not selecting first. Then maybe someone will ask "since there is one ony device, why not just select it by default".
When you want to clone device on a computer, definitely you have to be very careful to choose which one is which one.
The best strategy is to find a computer without important data, or, make thing easier. unplug the unrelated device. This will prevent any miss I believe.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback.
Steven