Rescuezilla 2.4.2 with HP Pavillion Laptop
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I created a USB stick with Rescuezilla 2.4.2 and successfully used it to backup 4 differen Linux systems with no errors.
I've been trying to use it to back up an HP Pavillion laptop and have hit a number of issues:
First is that the laptop doesn't appear to see the USB stick, so says nothing to boot from.
What I've tried:
Disable secure boot.
Enabled Legacy support.
Moved the USB/Drive option to the top of the boot list for both EFI and Legacy.
Totally does not see the USB stick when booting.
So, shifted gears and created a bootable DVD from the Rescuezilla image.
Changed the boot order to DVD drive in the BIOS.
Used an external USB DVD drive and this did boot.
Great, so selected backup, and got started.
First thing that was odd was that Rescuezilla only showed one partition and that appeared to have 0 bytes used, but the size appeared to be correct for the hard drive.
So I accepted it and it happily proceeded to back up 0 bytes in just a few seconds and proclaimed that everything was great.
So.. I moved over to trying Clonezilla, and clonezilla appears to be handling the notebook OK, still doing a boot off of the DVD.
It found all the partitions on the drive and is now working on backing up the main partition which has about 400 GBytes on it.
Any ideas why Rescuezilla couldn't see all the partitions on the drive?
I know that the HP BIOS pretty much sucks, and unless you can think of something else that I can try in the configuration it looks like it just doesn't want to boot the image.
I meant to add that the HP laptop doesn't want to boot the image from the USB stick.. But as mentioned when it does boot the backup process doesn't see all of the partitions on the hard drive, which clonezilla does.
Yep, my comment below took that interpretation
Glad you were able to successfully backup 4 different Linux systems without errors.
Not sure why your HP Pavillion can boot from DVD, but not USB. Are you able to boot another Linux distribution like Clonezilla on USB on that laptop? Does this problem persist even when trying a different USB port or removing and reinserting into the same port? How about with a different USB stick?
Weird that Rescuezilla can only show 1 partition in the backup menu before you started the imaging. What is the exact model of your HP Pavillion? If it's a recent laptop, then the upcoming Rescuezilla release based upon Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar" may assist (so could using existing Rescuezilla v2.4.2's "Kinetic" variant), as they provide a more recent Linux kernel than the default Rescuezilla release currently based on "Jammy", and the newer drivers may provide better hardware support for your system.
Thanks, I had tried different USB ports. It's a few years old Pavillion got it in 2017 as far as I recall. I'll get the exact model when Clonezilla has finished the backup. I'll try making another bootable USB stick with a different brand to see if that makes a difference. Probably won't get to test that until tomorrow.
Some more data: It appears that the HP BIOS doesn't like the original USB drive, refused to see it. I created a new bootable drive on a different brand and that boots fine. I still had the issue where only one 0 byte partition was reported by Rescuezilla but I found that if I use the back button and force a second scan that then all the partitions are found on the source drive. Continued on and started the backup but got messages about not being able to mount partitions because they were already mounted. But at least for most of them the underlying cause was that Windoze was hibernted. So booted back to Windoze and changed the configuration as needed and forced a full shutdown.
Rebooted to Rescuezilla and kicked off the backup. I had one pop up that flashed by saying it couldn't mount a partition I think again due to already being mounted. But I didn't capture that. Continued on and it is working on the backup. It's quite slow, but I expect that from the HP notebook hardware. I typically run Linux for 99% of what I do and only use this Windoze notebook for some specific Music software that doesn't run well on Linux, even in a VM.
So I'll see what happens in about 3 or 4 hours when the backup finishes.
I'm concerned about the initial message about being unable to mount a partition. Once this is all completed I'll try kicking off another backup to see if it is reproduceable.
Glad to heard a new USB drive of a different brand was able to boot on your HP BIOS.
Yeah, Windows hibernation and the need to do a special full shutdown by holding down a key, or using the restart option is annoying.
The summary page after the backup will contain any error messages that appeared during your backup, and the image folder's
clonezilla-imgfile is a log file of the entire backup, including any error messages.HP Pavillion Model: 15-cs2064st The backup completed but had the following pop up: Failed to run command: mount -o ro /dev/sda4 device or resource busy. When selecting to view the backup there is a pop up regarding a failure likely due to not being able to do a full backup, which makes sense since when starting the backup I got the failed to mount error message as well.
There are 4 partitions on source drive plus 9.1 MB of free space at the end:
1 - 260 MB Vfat system
2 - 16 MB MS_Reserved_Partition
3 - 930.3 GB ntfs Windows
4 - 980 MB ntfs Windows RE tools
5 - 0B
In the parts file for the backup rescuezilla reports 5 partitions, sda1 -4 plus a md127 which is NOT present in the parts file for the Clonezilla backup.
It is interesting that the mount failure was for sda4, which obviously was successfully mounted and processed. I was able to use the File browser in Rescuezilla to spot check that partition and everything looked good. So I'm hopint that if I ever have to restore from this backup that all the critical partitions are actually backed up.
Note that an older version of Clonezilla didn't throw up any errors and did a successful verification of that backup.
I did grab all the text log files and have those if you think there is any value.
I guess the question is why it tried to mount sda4 while it was already mounted at the start of the backup and after the backup finished. And also why Rescuezilla is showing the md127 device/partition.. If I had to guess that md127 somehow is mapping to sda4 and that is what triggers the error. But that is just a guess.
Thanks,
A bit more from the clonezilla-img log from latest run: Early in the log it lists just the 4 partitions on the HD. After the SMART section and os-prober it lists those 4 partitioins AND the on for /dev/md127
Then it lists the gpt partition table and in there it only shows the 4 partitions. From there everything looks good no errors. Ther is a message about "The backup GPT table is not on the end of the device".
When we get to sda3 the main Windows drive Run ntfsfix and don't schedule na NTFS .. check. ntfsfix returned 0: Mounting volume... FAILED
Attempting to correct errors... which appears to go fine but then says the disk contains an unclean file system (0,0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Then tries to see if it is NTFS boot reserved. And the mount request there returns 21 and said Device or resource busy. That was the initial error message box that appears.
But then it goes ahead and clones the partition, and as mentioned spot check looks good.
After a lot of progress bar output it then starts on sda4.
That also has a mounting failure after ntfsfix
And displays the error box for Device or resource busy. on sda4 which was the one I saw after the backup completed.
Then it does the clone of the partition with no error.
Then it cloned the /dev/md127 with no issues (0 bytes).
And at the end reports Successful backup of all partitions.
So the question is, are the mounting issues reported still related to it having been hibernated, even though I did all the steps to force a full shutdown, including turning off quick boot and holding the Shift when while clicking the shutdown menu option? Or some other culprit?
Thanks,