Clonezilla / Discussion / Help: Restoring ondifferent partitions (same size)

Roger Jargoyhen - 2021-01-12

Hi

I have been using Clonezilla for over seven years. Currently, I have still five different versions of Clonezilla, 2.5.2, 2.6.0., 2.6.5., 2.6.7., including the latest one, 2.7. I had been regularly cloning three partitions from one Nvme SSD disk, namely the boot loader, and the / and /home of Archlinux. I have Clonezilla images of these same three partitions spanning a period of eight months, from late August 2020 to the latest dated from the first of January 2021. I used a Nvme SSD of 128 G.

Though these partitions are deemed to be restorable (see photo 1), I have been unable to restore any of them due to the unexpected appearance of the same problem, a missing tool to update initramfs: see photo 2. I had to give up and I had no other OS on my computer...

After this failure, I changed my Nvme SSD to a new and bigger one (from 128 to 256 G) and I installed a Windows 10. This means that now, I need to restore at least my two missing Archlinux partition, not to GPT numbers 3 and 4, but to GPT numbers 5 and 6 which have the same size as the old ones. I hope this can be done on the command line. I would not restore the boot loader, and later try to register the restored Linux partitions in the bootloader using chroot (I'll have to learn how to do) and the Efibootmgr.

My question though, is to understand what happened to trigger this mistake and how to be sure to prevent it. I did restore partitions in the past and have never encountered such a problem.

This is how the new Nvme looks now

Disque /dev/nvme0n1 : 232,89 GiB, 250059350016 octets, 488397168 secteurs
Modèle de disque : KINGSTON SA2000M8250G
Unités : secteur de 1 × 512 = 512 octets
Taille de secteur (logique / physique) : 512 octets / 512 octets
taille d'E/S (minimale / optimale) : 512 octets / 512 octets
Type d'étiquette de disque : gpt
Identifiant de disque : 1538A21D-48AB-4F94-ADDD-314970852813

Périphérique Début Fin Secteurs Taille Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 536575 534528 261M Système EFI
/dev/nvme0n1p2 536576 798719 262144 128M Réservé Microsoft
/dev/nvme0n1p3 798720 244832590 244033871 116,4G Données de base Microsoft
/dev/nvme0n1p4 244834304 253026303 8192000 3,9G Partition d'échange Linux
/dev/nvme0n1p5 253026304 312418303 59392000 28,3G Système de fichiers Linux
/dev/nvme0n1p6 312418304 371810303 59392000 28,3G Système de fichiers Linux
/dev/nvme0n1p7 371810304 429154303 57344000 27,3G Système EFI
/dev/nvme0n1p8 429154304 488396799 59242496 28,2G Système de fichiers Linux

Thanks for a great program.

Roger

Last edit: Roger Jargoyhen 2021-01-12

DSC03210.JPG

DSC03212.JPG

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Steven Shiau - 2021-01-13

Maybe you can try to enter expert mode, and choose "-iui":
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/02_Restore_disk_image/images/ocs-09-advanced-param-extra.png

Steven

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Roger Jargoyhen - 2021-01-14

Thank you for your help. I took note of the full restore command line beginning with /usr/sbin/ocs -sr and including the -iui option.

However I do not know if and how to target partitions with a new number. Clonezailla-made image contains three nvme partitions numbered 1, 3, and 4 . Because of the appearance of Windows 10, I would like that nvme3 be used to restore nvme5 and that nvme4 be used to restore nvme6. They have the same size as the old ones.

Maybe a direct solution could be to open up the image and change two numbers, giving them the ones of the new target partitions?

Is there a possibility of getting back my files, or is it hopeless?

Last edit: Roger Jargoyhen 2021-01-15

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Steven Shiau - 2021-01-18

"I would like that nvme3 be used to restore nvme5 and that nvme4 be used to restore nvme6" -> You can restore the image saved from nvme3 to nvme5 first using restoreparts, then start it again to restore the image saved from nvme4 to nvme6.

Steven

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Roger Jargoyhen - 2021-01-18

Thank you very much for this information.

I'll begin to restore my lost partitions as you said, one at a time.

Roger

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Roger Jargoyhen - 2021-01-25

To begin with, I signalled in the first post some errors for restoring partitions. After checking carefully, I have found that Clonezilla is not the source of these mistakes.

I had used a "wrapper" software (a little like Ventoy) for some years. It has just stopped being reliable (no more maintained) in 2020 and an accident was just prone to happen. at first use It did...

I switched to Ventoy and found that Clonezilla did save and restore faultlessly like it had always done. This has to be said.

Now, to come back on the subject of this thread, I read the faq number 102 in the Clonezilla documentation and tried to restore my partitions adapting the aa, ab and even ac files with the new partition numbers. This one:
https://drbl.org/faq/fine-print.php?path=./2_System/102_restore_image_to_different_partition.faq#102_restore_image_to_different_partition.faq

It happens that I must also replace the pt/parted file. I would like to produce a file of this kind for my new partition table.

My question is: how this file has been produced? It looks a lot like a fdisk file, but not exactly. Which command should I use?

Last edit: Roger Jargoyhen 2021-01-25

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Steven Shiau - 2021-01-29

"must also replace the pt/parted file" -> Which file did you mean? Please show the full file name so that we can identify that.

Steven

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Sorry for being unclear

I am looking for the exact command to recreate on another disk this kind of file:

nvme0n1-pt.parted

which contains this text

Model: SAMSUNG MZVLW128HEGR-000L2 (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 250069680s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start       End         Size        File system     Name                  Flags
 1      2048s       534527s     532480s     fat32           EFI system partition  boot, esp
 2      534528s     12822527s   12288000s   linux-swap(v1)  swap                  swap
 3      12822528s   70166527s   57344000s   ext4            racine
 4      70166528s   127510527s  57344000s   ext4            home
 5      127510528s  250068991s  122558464s  ext4            virtuel

Last edit: Roger Jargoyhen 2021-01-30

Steven Shiau - 2021-01-30

The file "nvme0n1-pt.parted" is created by this command:
LC_ALL=C parted -s /dev/nvme0n1 print > nvme0n1-pt.parted
In addition, the file nvme0n1-pt.sf is created by this command:
LC_ALL=C sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1 > nvme0n1-pt.sf

Steven

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Roger Jargoyhen - 2021-02-02

Thank you very much for your reply and your help.

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Roger Jargoyhen - 2021-02-02

And this is to report full success.

After taking care of the above information, the two partitions have been restored to p7 and p8. These partitions have yet to be chrooted to be bootable again but this is a well commented topic on Arch linux.

The Clonezilla comments about the image (see below) are to be compared with the ones in the first post. This time, I used Ventoy to carry the Clonezilla iso instead of the faulty previous multiboot.

Again, thank you very much for your help and this superb software.

👍
1

Last edit: Roger Jargoyhen 2021-02-02

DSC03341.JPG

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Steven Shiau - 2021-02-02

OK, good. Thanks for your feedback.

Steven

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Restoring ondifferent partitions (same size)

A partition and disk imaging/cloning program

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Restoring ondifferent partitions (same size)

Restoring ondifferent partitions (same size)

A partition and disk imaging/cloning program

Forums

Help

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Restoring ondifferent partitions (same size)