Clonezilla / Discussion / Help: Clonezilla doesn't run on old computers (intel pentium 233MMX; intel 80386)

Ulrich D i e z - 2015-05-28

Hello,

I have an old machine:

An Intel Pentium 233MMX with 256 MB SD-RAM.
Mainboard is Gigabyte GA 586 TX3. That Board has USB 1.0
connectors and an IDE-Controller.
There is also an Adaptec AHA 2940 UW SCSI Controller.

On the SCSI-Controller I have an internal 4GB harddisk.
On the IDE-Controller I have an internal 20GB harddisk.
CD-ROM-Drives are attached to the SCSI-Controller.

I attached an external 3TB USB-Intenso-harddisk to one of the
USB-connectors.

Then I tried using Clonezilla for backing up the internal harddisks,
saving the backup-images on the external USB harddisk.

It did not work.

I tried the following releases and encountered the following
erroneous behavior:

1) Clonezilla live stable_debian: clonezilla-live-2.1.2-43-i486.iso

Step 1: When SCSI-Controller was checked during the boot-sequence,
a message occurred about a bootable CD being present in one
of the CD-ROM-Drives.
Step 2: When the machine tried to boot from that CD, I just saw a
blank/black screen for about 30 seconds. Then the machine
rebooted. When rebooting, the events of step 1 took place
again.
In other words: The machine entered some endless rebooting-loop.
That loop could be intercepted by removing the Clonezilla CD from
the CD-ROM-drive.

2) Clonezilla live stable_ubuntu: clonezilla-live-20130819-raring-i386.iso

Same as with 1) clonezilla live stable_debian: clonezilla-live-2.1.2-43-i486.iso .

3) Clonezilla live stable_alternative: clonezilla-live-20150217-utopic-i386.iso

The CD was booted.
I got to the menu where you can select
- to run Clonezilla in with default settings
- Other modes of Clonezilla live
- Local operation system in harddrive (if available)
- Memtest & FreeDOS
- Network boot via iPXE

No matter what mode I tried to run Clonezilla live in, I always
got the message:

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
pae cmov
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

According to the Clonezilla web-page, the release in question should work
for intel 80386-CPUS.

cmov and pae are available on intel 80686-CPUs (Pentium Pro / Pentium 2)
and above.

Claiming that a system requiruig these operations would work
on an intel80386 is sort of ridiculous.

The pae and cmov operations are definitely not supported by
intel 80386 CPUs. They are not even supported on intel 80586 CPUs
(Pentium / Pentium MMX).

4) clonezilla live stable_debian: clonezilla-live-2.3.2-22-i586.iso

The CD was booted.

I got to the menu where you can select
- to run Clonezilla in with default settings
- Other modes of Clonezilla live
- Local operation system in harddrive (if available)
- Memtest & FreeDOS
- Network boot via iPXE

I selected to run Clonezilla with Default settings.
I got a blank/black screen for almost 5 minutes.
Then a message popped up:

[ 60.416511 microcode: Intel CPU family 0x5 not supported

Nonetheless the booting-procedure continued.
It took almost half an hour until the menues of Clonzilla popped up.
I tried to backup the 20GB harddisk to the external 3TB harddisk.
While the image was written by CloneZilla, no error-message occurred.
This took 4 hours.
When the image was checked by CloneZilla, a message occurred about
the image being corrupt.
It took another 2 hours to get to this point.

5) Driven by curiosity, I also tried the most recent stable releases
for AMD64 from the Clonezilla web-page.
I didn't expect them to run on my old machine.
Same as with 1) clonezilla live stable_debian: clonezilla-live-2.1.2-43-i486.iso .

So my question is:

Is there a (older) release of clonezilla available that does really work
with older machines like my Intel Pentium 233 MMX-machine?

I also sometimes still use an intel 80386 machine with 8MB RAM and
112MB harddrive, running MS-DOS 5.0 and MS-Windows 3.1 .

The BIOS of that machine does not support booting from CD-ROM.

But I can boot bootable CDs with that machine, using a bootable 3.5-inch
floppy disk containing the plop-boot-manager by Elmar Hanlhofer
(see https://www.plop.at/de/bootmanagers.html) .

That boot manager offers a menu where you can select which device the
machine should actually boot from.
When selecting CD-ROM-Drive, the machine will boot from CD-ROM-drive.

This way I tried to boot

2) Clonezilla live stable_ubuntu: clonezilla-live-20130819-raring-i386.iso

The effect was that the machine rebooted.

3) Clonezilla live stable_alternative: clonezilla-live-20150217-utopic-i386.iso

The CD was booted.
I got to the menu where you can select
- to run Clonezilla in with default settings
- Other modes of Clonezilla live
- Local operation system in harddrive (if available)
- Memtest & FreeDOS
- Network boot via iPXE

No matter what mode I tried to run Clonezilla live in, I always
got the message:

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
pae cmov
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

To be honest:
Even if there was not the issue about the wrong processor-instructions,
I doubt that 8MB RAM (by the way: 4MB was standard when
intel 80386-machines were en voge) will suffice for running Clonezilla.

Sincerely

Ulrich

Last edit: Ulrich D i e z 2015-05-28

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Steven Shiau - 2015-05-30

Thanks for raising this issue.
I am afraid that your machine is really too old for the Clonezilla live to run.
If you find any version of Debian or Ubuntu work on your machine, then Clonezilla live might work. Let me know that if you have.

Steven.

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Steven Shiau - 2015-05-30

BTW, there is a discussion about non-pae machine here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/bugs/226/
You can refer to that and do some tests there.
If you find anything new, please let us know.
Thanks.

Steven.

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Ulrich D i e z - 2015-05-30

I succeeded in the end:

Using

clonezilla live stable_debian: clonezilla-live-2.3.2-22-i586.iso

I - within a second attempt - successfully had created images of
the harddisks of my old machine by booting that old machine from
live-CD.

When the first attempt of doing so took place, the external
3TB USB-Intenso-harddisk was connected to one of the
USB-1.0-connectors of the old machine's Gigabyte GA 586 TX3
mainboard.

When the second attempt of doing so took place, the external
3TB USB-Intenso-harddisk was attached to one of the
USB-2.0-connectors of a Raspberry Pi which in turn made available
that external harddisk via network as a Samba-share.
Creating images and checking them via network/Samba-share took
about 2 hours and 30 minutes.

( Booting a virtual machine hosted on a more recent Windows 7-PC
from Clonezilla-live-CD and writing data from the images to the
virtual machine's harddisks also worked out nicely. )

Summa sumarum:

clonezilla live stable_debian: clonezilla-live-2.3.2-22-i586.iso
does work on my old Pentium 233MMX machine.

I suppose that problems at the time of checking the image were
caused during my first attempt by the fact that the external
harddisk was attached to a very slow USB-1.0-connector while with
most machines the standards USB-2.0 and USB-3.0 are en vogue.

Nonetheless I am still convinced that live-CDs that are produced from

Clonezilla live stable_alternative: clonezilla-live-20150217-utopic-i386.iso

will only work on machines with intel Pentium Pro processors and
newer but will work neither with intel 80386-processors, nor with
intel 80486-processors nor with intel 80586-processors.

The message

| This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
| pae cmov
| Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

indicates that the operations "pae" and "cmov" are required for
successfully running the kernel of the live-CD while these
operations are available on intel 80686-processors and newer but
not on intel 80586-processors and older.

Probably adjusting some compiler-switch which is relevant during the
process of compiling/building the programs in question and creating the
iso image file so that machine code suitable also for older CPUs gets
produced is sufficient (as long as the machine in question has enough
RAM for running Clonezilla).

Sincerely

Ulrich

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- Peter Kuykendall - 2015-05-30
  
  Hi Ulrich -
  
  I had a similar problem. Steven and I experimented and figured out that Ubuntu recently broke support for CPUs without PAE. So any 386/486/586/Pentium/Pentium M/ class CPUs require a Debian-based OS, which uses a different kernel.
  
  Thanks - Pete
  
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Steven Shiau - 2015-05-30

Thanks. Yes, the linux-image-586 from Debian Linux does support non-PAE CPU. I did such a test on virtualbox with non-PAE CPU and it works.
Thanks.

Steven.

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Clonezilla doesn't run on old computers (intel pentium 233MMX; intel 80386)

A partition and disk imaging/cloning program

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Clonezilla doesn't run on old computers (intel pentium 233MMX; intel 80386)

Clonezilla doesn't run on old computers (intel pentium 233MMX; intel 80386)

A partition and disk imaging/cloning program

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Help

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Clonezilla doesn't run on old computers (intel pentium 233MMX; intel 80386)