Dell Tower 3620 BIOS crash after restoredisk
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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i have following problem after using clonezilla-live version (2.5.5-32-amd64:
After backing up a Dell System (Precision tower 3620) with "savedisk", installing a different operating system e.g. CentOS, i try to restore the original operating systems e.g. FreeBSD11 (zfs filesystem saved with dd) and Ubuntu Budgie (dualboot on the same SSD) everything in clonezilla seems to work fine, the restore process works fine without any errors, but if i try to boot the Dell workstation after the restore operation, the BIOS shows only the DELL logo and then it throws me into a blank screen. The machine is not usable any more.
There is no longer the possibility to open the BIOS setup after the "restoredisk" operation via F2. The only possibility i had was to call Dell support to replace the motherboard. I did this twice and i will get now the second new motherboard.
The backup seems to destroy parts of the UEFI BIOS during the restore process.
I don't want to try to restore the disk on more time (with the possibility of another BIOS fault). Could anyone explain what might happen? Is this an issue with restoring environment variables with the UEFI Bios? Are there any checks of clonezilla when restoring the image?
Any ideas?
The boot of the installed different operating systems is in UEFI mode, clonezilla is also loaded in UEFI mode. The disk layout is GPT. There are 2 disks in the system (no RAID).
Last edit: Stefan Zipprich 2018-11-05
This is very weird... How come Clonezilla live could destroy the uEFI BIOS... There is one possibility is the BIOS firmware has something wrong which maybe be triggered by the Linux kernel during booting or restoring. Did you try to upgrade the firmware first?
Steven
I am in contact now with DELL support on the issue. What exactly is done during the restore process after restoring the partitions. Do you use efibootmgr to restore the UEFI variables? Is ist possible to suppress the use of efibootmgr? How can this be done?
Stefan
To skip updating efi NVRAM, you can enter expert mode, check "-iefi" option:
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/02_Restore_disk_image/advanced/09-advanced-param.php
Steven
DELL support Germany accepted the issue. They can now reproduce the problem with the BIOS. There is no problem when using the "-iefi" option, therefore this looks like a first workaround. DELL international has now to investigate if the BIOS corruption is due to a clonezilla software bug or due to a BIOS bug.
I will report back, when i get the results back from DELL support.
There seems to be the same issues with a Optiplex system.
Stefan
Thanks for your feedback. Now it seems there are reports about similar issue. Two more are here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/bugs/310/
https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Clonezilla_live/thread/76ba35a226/
Hope Dell support Germany can find the culprit. If it's about efibootmgr, then definitely we should report to upstream.
Steven
In Clonezilla live >= 2.6.0-31 or 20181217-*, we have temporarily blacklisted Dell machine in the program update-efi-nvram-boot-entry. It's the same with enabling the option "-iefi".
Thank you for issue report.
Let's focus on this bug report, and please update any info or update here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/bugs/310/
Steven
Last edit: Steven Shiau 2018-12-18
There is an updating notice on this bug report:
https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/bugs/310/
Steven