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Cannot restore logical partition

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2009-04-19
2013-04-05
  • olaf schmidt

    olaf schmidt - 2009-04-19

    So, I have been trying a lot but I do not know anymore.

    I want to restore a partition but I do not get this partition as an option in the clonezilla dialog.

    I have a windows system partition that is on sda5 when I boot into livelinux. It is NTFS. I made a partition image on a NFTS external usb drive, so far ok.

    In a virtual machine, I want to test the image restoring. I configure a harddisk of more GB than the source harddisk of the partition.
    I have a backup of the MBR (by dd command) and the extended partition table (by sfdisk command). I first create the MBR with no problems. I used knoppix. It shows hda1 and hda2. I then used sfdisk to create the extended table. It creates empty hda3, hda4 (no sectors) and hda5 and hda6.

    I know start clonezilla and I can see that it recognizes all the hdas. I select restore partition from image and use all standard options. But when I am to select the target partition hda5, it is not there. There is only my source partition.

    On the command line of clonezilla, I cannot mount hda5. It says the volume is corrupt. But that is not surprising, since there is no file structure on it, right?

    It is really hard to do a backup of the windows partition. I was looking on the net but could not find someone who did this. Perhaps you can help me.

     
    • Steven Shiau

      Steven Shiau - 2009-04-20

      Olaf,
      Could you please:
      1. Boot clonezilla live, enter command line prompt
      2. sudo su -
      3. pated -s /dev/hda print
      4. fdisk -l /dev/hda
      5. cat /proc/partitions
      6. blkid

      Please post the results of 3-6 so it's easier for us to see why.

      Steven.

       
    • olaf schmidt

      olaf schmidt - 2009-04-22

      I will answer to this soon. I would like Clonezilla to get easily a NTFS Windows partition backup. Would be great. I have tried manually ntfsclone, partimage and dd, even dd_rescue but always had problems. Perhaps it is because I am doing it in vmware, and I did not allocate the harddisk space when creating the virtual disk. I was also configuring IDE harddisk and I am trying SCSI now. Ok, I will answer soon, at the moment I am trying another restore.

       
    • olaf schmidt

      olaf schmidt - 2009-04-23

      Sorry for the delay. Here is the output of the commands.
      By the way, my harddisk is sda.

      I have a notebook on which was Windows Vista. I banned that on sda2 I think (about 8 GB). I put Windows XP and it boots to it (about 20 GB). It is on sda5. I have another 120 GB for data.  When I use Clonezilla, I try a partition backup of sda2 and sda5. I am trying to restore the Windows XP system partition, bootable, in a virtual machine of vmware.

      If you tell me I need to go without the recovery partition of Vista, I will gladly kick this shit to the void. hehehe

      ********************* PARTED OUTPUT ************************

      Disk /dev/sda: 160GB
      Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
      Partition Table: msdos

      Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags
      1      8225kB  151GB   151GB   extended               lba 
      5      8258kB  22.0GB  22.0GB  logical   ntfs             
      6      22.0GB  151GB   129GB   logical   ntfs             
      2      151GB   160GB   8793MB  primary   ntfs         boot

      ***********************************************************
      ***********************************************************
      ********************* FDISK OUTPUT **************************

      Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
      255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
      Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

         Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
      /dev/sda1               2       18388   147693577+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
      /dev/sda2   *       18389       19457     8586742+   7  HPFS/NTFS
      /dev/sda5               2        2678    21502971    7  HPFS/NTFS
      /dev/sda6            2679       18388   126190543+   7  HPFS/NTFS

      ***********************************************************
      ***********************************************************
      ********************* PROC OUTPUT **************************

      major minor  #blocks  name

         8     0  156290904 sda
         8     1          1 sda1
         8     2    8586742 sda2
         8     5   21502971 sda5
         8     6  126190543 sda6
         7     0      62192 loop0
         8    16     960512 sdb
         8    17     960496 sdb1

      ***********************************************************
      ***********************************************************
      ********************* BLKID OUTPUT **************************

      /dev/sdb1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="PublicZone" UUID="066E-2F41" TYPE="vfat"
      /dev/sda2: TYPE="ntfs"
      /dev/sda5: TYPE="ntfs"
      /dev/sda6: TYPE="ntfs"

      ***********************************************************
      ***********************************************************

       
      • Steven Shiau

        Steven Shiau - 2009-04-24

        Olaf,
        From your description, your XP system is on sda5, and your data partition is on sda6:
        5 8258kB 22.0GB 22.0GB logical ntfs 
        6 22.0GB 151GB 129GB logical ntfs 

        So you mean you was trying to restore the Windows XP system partition, bootable, in a virtual machine of vmware. What did you mean ? You just want to restore sda5 and sda6 to a disk on vmware, and it's new, unformated disk ?

        Steven.

         
    • olaf schmidt

      olaf schmidt - 2009-04-24

      I want to have a system backup of my Windows XP. I do not care about the data partition which is sda6, yes. I backup data manually when I need.
      But if the system crashes, I would like to be able to restore it, even on a new harddisk. I expect clonezilla to restore all necessary partitions on a new harddisk so that I can boot automatically into Windows XP, using the new harddisk.
      To test this, I am using a blank disk without partition table in a virtual machine in vmware server. However, there may be difficulties because of that. For example, I usually use "do not allocate disk space now" which is a feature that lets the disk file dynamically grow.
      To see if it is that problem I created a fully allocated disk of slightly more space than the complete harddisk of my Windows XP laptop in a virtual machine on an external usb harddisk (which is FAT32 formatted). Tonight I will try a complete restore of the harddisk which I expect to work. I didn't have problems with complete harddisk restoration, only with partitions. But even if I did it manually with various tools as I said before.
      I thought that my problem would be a common one but it does not seem so. Ah, right windows user usually have only one partition. hehehe

       
    • olaf schmidt

      olaf schmidt - 2009-04-24

      I forgot to mention that I tried to restore sda2 and sda5 since they belong together, is it? primary and logical partition. I cannot see sda1 as an option in clonezilla, otherwise I would try to restore that, too.
      clonezilla fails after the restoration process was initiated. I will post future errors.

       
    • olaf schmidt

      olaf schmidt - 2009-04-24

      what a disappointment. During the restore process of the first partition (sda2) I get the following error from gunzip:
      stdin: invalid compressed data--format violated

       
      • Steven Shiau

        Steven Shiau - 2009-04-27

        "stdin: invalid compressed data--format violated", oops... looks like something went wrong when compressing the image using gzip... No idea why.

        Steven.

         

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