Hi, I have made at least 4 usb boot disks from 3 different ISO downloads and none will boot, my laptop says nothing to boot from ..... I have used both LinuxMint image writer and BalenaEtcher to make the boot sticks, when I try to access the stick from Linux I get an error message as well.
I've used BalenaEtcher last week, made 4 different thumbdrives, they all boot. I booted from a Windows 10 laptop, a Panasonic CF-52, A HP Pavillion i3 running Proxmox (linux os), a Dell Server 710, two other laptops. The only thing I could not get to work was attempting to make a virtual machine of Rescuezilla inside of proxmox. I used the 64 bit Rescuezilla iso.
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The only thing I could not get to work was attempting to make a virtual machine of Rescuezilla inside of proxmox
I have never used Proxmox, but the "Practical IT with Jeremy Leik" YouTube channel had no issues using Rescuezilla with Proxmox. You might be interested in part 4 of his tutorial: Rescuezilla Part 4 - Backup VM in Proxmox to NAS (2020). It looks like it just requires selecting the Rescuezilla ISO image file, and double-checking the boot device order.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2020-06-27
Did you use etcher? im just some random guy on here but i have noticed that these secure boot enabled iso images cant just use any old usb maker. like fedora didnt work for me using rufus (i may have had an old version) then i tried the fedora media writer and all was well.
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Thanks for attempting to use Rescuezilla! I'm sorry it took 6 days to reply to you two -- I didn't see this forum post until now (it was stuck awaiting moderation).
I have had never had any issues at all using balenaEtcher to write the Rescuezilla image onto a USB stick and boot a computer from it. What are the specifications of your computer?
Side note to address your attached image: the message you see about /dev/sdb3 not being mountable is to be expected. If you wish to examine the root filesystem of your Rescuezilla USB stick, the correct command is to run mount /dev/sdb /mnt (yes sdb, not sdb3). The reason is Rescuezilla image is an ISO9660 filesystem written directly onto your device (/dev/sdb) with no partition table (though within the ISO9660 filesystem there are MBR and GPT partition tables -- which I find a very strange concept). Of the 3 partitions exposed in the GPT partition table, only the EFI System Partition appears to be correctly exposed. I'm not sure why that is, but it definitely does not matter: the ESP is all that matters during EFI boot. Regardless of this, the Rescuezilla roadmap calls for getting rid of ISO9660 and move to partitioning structure with persistence (task #8), so there's no point trying to expose the other two partitions on GPT.
Aside from your computer's specifications, which version of Rescuezilla did you have trouble booting? Was it the 32-bit version of 64-bit version?
Due to the explanation in the comment above, I am not too worried when a user tries to use their operating system's file manager to open the Rescuezilla USB stick, gets shown a message like "Wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error", because that's not how Rescuezilla is intended to be used. I am a lot more concerned if there are users who are unable to create a Rescuezilla bootable USB stick using balenaEtcher, or are unable to boot a Rescuezilla USB stick.
If you have any issues creating Rescuezilla bootable USB stick using balenaEtcher, please provide details below. (You can post anonymously if you'd like)
Last edit: Rescuezilla 2020-07-15
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2022-11-21
absolutely not.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2020-07-15
I am that user. When I tried to boot using the pendrive, all I got was a blinking cursor.
Thanks.
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As alluded to in the comments section of your AskUbuntu question linked above, the AskUbuntu website suggested that our back-and-forth discussion be moved to the StackExchange Chat. If you would like to receive further support, please respond to my most recent reply on the StackExchange chat: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/110683/discussion-between-shasheene-and-fixit7 (or post below this comment, if you would prefer).
By the way, given that all discussion is usually of interest to the broader community, the best place to receive Rescuezilla support is this Rescuezilla Sourceforge forum.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2021-05-24
I am having similar issues. Here is what I found.
Running the usb (created with balena-etcher) on a system with empty ssd, rescuezilla starts and works as expected. Using it on a system to create a back-up copy, the system do not see the data and hence boot from the internal SSD. I tried to plug usb on usb3 and usb2 but nothing changes.
I tried to reflash the usb (again with balena-etcher) but i get similar results.
Now I am stuck and unable to backup our system :)
We only use ubuntu 20.04 if it makes any difference.
I even tried to force booting from usb but it's like the usb is empty.
Trying same usb on an wiped out machine appears to work (it boots correctly)
Very strange as for the first day the usb worked correctly (from memory I had it in the usb3 port)
Also, strange that the system reports Low Battery when the machine is not a portable?
Anyway, hope i find a solution as it's much faster solution than clonezilla
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It's very strange that your USB stick with Rescuezilla installed using balenaEtcher works on some machines, but not others.
It might be worth going into the BIOS configuration and temporarily turning Secure Boot off. Also try disabling "Fast Boot" option if any such option exists. Then try booting Rescuezilla and rapidly press a key like Esc/F8/F9/F12 until you can boot from BIOS. Hopefully you can boot into the Rescuezilla menu screen. Don't forget to change the BIOS settings back to the original once you have finished with Rescuezilla.
What kind of computer do you use (Dell, HP, ASUS etc?) Yes any "low battery" status for a system that does not contain a battery is not correct and I'll try to improve it.
Hopefully my suggestion above solves the problem! Let me know how you go!
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2021-05-24
Hi Rescuezilla,
I didn't expect a reply so fast, thank you so much for that. Some good news from my end and my workaround (heck it took me two days)
First, machines affected are Dell-wyse Z90D7 thin clients. We have 70 of them. We are updating the bios to latest one version 3U and for some reason the reflashing disable "ACPI P state".
I know it's quite irrelevant (well I thought so) but tonight in despair I started updating one of the older systems (with bios from 2014) surprisingly that machine booted correctly for the back-up so I dag on everything I could think of and found in Bios that ACPI default to off if upgrade is done from bios 2B but remain on from older bios. I didn't have any time to do more testing but tomorrow can replicate my findings to see if it makes sense. For us ACPI is irrelevant as the machines are always on and run containers, so they need to always be on and not going to sleep. My understanding is that ACPI should NOT affect ability to read usb especially during boot?
Anyway, I can run more tests if you need to, can spare few machines and reach bottom line of it.
So far the problem is on my side:
with the upgrade from 1A to 3U bios, acpi remains on: Rescuezilla boots and works.
with the upgrade from 2B to 3U bios, acpi goes off and Rescuezilla is not seen. (any other usb boot)
if i re-enable acpi, Rescuezilla boots normally.
Not a big drama for me as I run a script to flash bios on the go and reboot, will add acpi setting.
BTW I noticed you in Adelaide? Perth here!
Will let you know how my testing go and if you need I can run more testing if you want.
Next on my list is to enable the facility to use same usb stick to save the image and avoid having an extra ssd to plug in!
Cheers, Franco
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If you have 70 network-connected computers and expect to image them with any regularity then Rescuezilla is definitely not the most time-efficient tool. There's a tool called FOG Project which can deploy an image to all 70 machines with 1 click based on a network-boot architecture. The (massive) downside of FOG Project the initial configuration is requires an IT administrator as it's a Linux tool that needs "DHCP Option 66 and 67" configured on the network's DHCP server. But if you're going to be deploying images onto a large amount of computers with any regularity then upfront cost of the IT system administrator configuring FOG Project is worthwhile. And once FOG Project is installed and configured it's pretty easy to use.
ACPI is how the operating system does configuration and power management so disabling it may cause issues. ACPI is required for plug-and-play, hotswapping and device discovery, so I wouldn't be surprised if disabling it causes issues with the detection of USB sticks.
I would also recommend staying at the most recent BIOS version and try to determine a solution. Enabling ACPI may be all that's required.
By the way, I recommend determining if your computers can "see" the USB stick in the BIOS. Usually there is a button like 'Escape' or 'F12' that allows to see a "one-time boot menu" where you can see all the devices detected by the BIOS, If it displays the model of the USB stick and its capacity then the BIOS has successfully detected the USB stick.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2021-05-28
Ok, I can confirm that with ACPI was the cause of my issue and NOT related to Rescuezilla itself.
I had a look at the FOG project and it's very interesting but the overhead for me to get it up and running is too much. We have clusters of 8 to 12 machines (not only the wyse-dell) and deployment is not always the same. For now I am happy to keep using Rescuezilla to get things moving.
One great option (for us) would be to use the empty partition in the usb to store the 4 more used images and avoid having a secondary drive to carry images. Due to our network segmentation, I can't have a main repository running. Cheers, Franco
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Also be sure to upgrade to Rescuezilla v2.2 in a few days. It has a lot of improvements!
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2021-05-28
Great! Will check v2.2 when it comes out. Keep up the good stuff! My opinion (reading in Github): Rescuezilla is a well designed tool to backup/restore and clone machines. Your software does it well and fast. Our images are of 16/32 and 64gb ssd so pretty small and hence for me would be nice to stick the 4 most used into the same stick but my use case is not probably what most other users need so becomes irrelevant in your priority list and I agree! Also, giving option to alter the tool with persistence may end up in disaster if the "user" is not as skilled or aware of consequences. Flexibility is good and so are options but at the end of the day, if it reduce security or reliability (operator error) may no longer be efficient as it is now. Cheers, Franco
👍
1
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2022-12-01
I'm having problems getting Rescuezilla to boot, as well. 64 GB USB memory stick, no fast boot or secure boot, Dell Inspiron N7110 laptop running Zorin OS.
I tried it with sudo dd via Terminal, and I tried it in the Drives application (restore from an image).
I can see the files and partitions on the drive, but when I boot, it say the boot image is corrupted. I tried it on my kid's computer, and it won't even give that, it won't even try to boot (it's a much older Compaq Presario V3000, but it can boot from USB... that's how I got Zorin OS on it).
I'm going to try another liveCD image and see if it boots.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2022-12-01
Ok, I tried Clonezilla, using the Drives application (restore from an image)... it boots and runs just fine.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2024-03-18
for me, plain Clonezilla bootable USB made (on win7) with Universal USB-installer... works and has let me create an image, but restoring the image gives a badly-translated error
Rescuezilla isn't supported by Universal USB-installer, and selecting the Clonezilla option as the closest causes the resulting USB to load plain Clonezilla without the Rescuezilla UI
Rescuezilla USB created with Rufus 3.22 starts booting into Rescuezilla but gets stuck on a flashing cursor screen
I'm not even sure Clonezilla supports what I want to do, which is to make a bootable Win7 backup by restoring a 220GB image of a 1000GB SSD with only 400GB used space onto a 480GB SSD. The reason I'm trying Rescuezilla is in case the translation is better.
Windows Backup & Restore isn't working because of some issue with the Shadow Volume service. Aomei Backupper stops at 0% and I'm not persevering with that because I've since found out it's Chinese.
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I've never tried Universal USB-installer, but the currently I only provide "official support" (in that I'll test myself and happy to provide as much user support as required for) to create a Rescuezilla USB by directly writing the ISO image to a USB stick with balenaEtcher.
Unrelated side note: I hope to officially support Ventoy, which (like Aomei Backupper as you mention) is also made in China. But the source code is open (but I haven't personally vetted it yet for binary blobs).
You may wish to raise a ticket with the makers of "Universal USB-installer" and they can add any special handling. The Rescuezilla ISO image is created using its custom own build scripts (it's not simply reusing the Clonezilla build script or the Ubuntu build scripts etc) but using the standard ISO construction application on Linux. It's possible "Universal USB-installer" have to do some special analysis to get Rescuezilla ISO images to work with that program.
I'm probably wrong, but I believe Rufus may also uses some custom extraction logic + possibly installing the GRUB bootloader, rather than doing a raw write like balenaEtcher.
Regardless, 'getting stuck on flashing cursor screen' is often an indication that your hardware is too recent for the current (ageing) Linux kernel in Rescuezilla v2.4.2 (I'll be releasing a new Rescuezilla version in the next 3 weeks). Please try the latest Rescuezilla prerelease ("2023-11-26") based on Ubuntu's Mantic verison: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/releases There's reason to believe it will boot better on your hardware due to a more recent Linux kernel.
I'm not even sure Clonezilla supports what I want to do, which is to make a bootable Win7 backup by restoring a 220GB image of a 1000GB SSD with only 400GB used space onto a 480GB SSD. The reason I'm trying Rescuezilla is in case the translation is better.
Clonezilla has the same limitation, but additionally you have to go into Expert mode and enable the icds option and resize the partition table proportionally.
Windows Backup & Restore isn't working because of some issue with the Shadow Volume service.
Whatever tool you use, it's worth doing filesystem checks etc using Windows chkdsk.
Also be very careful to get into Clonezilla and Rescuezilla by using Windows' 'Restart' comand rather than 'Shutdown'. Because Windows filesystems have this 'hibernation' mode they go into.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2024-03-19
Thanks so much Rescuezilla, I was able to get my backup working. It turned out I was still using an outdated version of UUI and the current version already does support Rescuezilla distinct from Clonezilla. That fixed the flashing cursor. So I suppose it was a problem with Rufus.
Rescuezilla v2.4.2 only supports this if you're shrunken your source disk before creating the image:
The improved translation/user prompts of Rescuezilla was super useful for this.
I did notice one confusing piece of text on Rescuezilla. This was about image recovery. Where it says to take care in case there have been any changes to the filesystem on the destination drive... I think it should also have said that if the destination drive is unformatted(or differently formatted) then first GParted should be used to give it similar partitions to the image that's being restored. It's like the wording assumed the image is being restored back onto the same physical disk it was imaged from.
To image a fragmented SSD while reducing the free space I found difficult. To back up from a 1TB SSD onto a 500GB SSD it should be around half of the disk. But to actually shrink the partition that space must be contiguous/consecutive and at the end of the drive. To consolidate the free space I used (in MS command prompt) defrag /U /V /X but this process requires free space of its own. E.g. from a 1TB SSD with 500GB data to a 500GB SSD with 300GB data.
I ended up removing everything from the drive that wasn't nailed down - then defragmenting, shrinking the partition, making the image, recovering the image - and finally copying everything back onto both the backup and the original drive.
But if I'd know that at the start, it would have been easier than all the time I wasted with Windows Backup trying to fix the Shadow Volume Service.
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Just noting manual defragmenting is not required. When GParted is shrinking a partition it will automatically shifting the data down. This can be a slow process for almost completely full disks. But it should be acceptably fast for most disks, because not much data needs to be moved, and the data can be shifted efficiently.
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Hi, I have made at least 4 usb boot disks from 3 different ISO downloads and none will boot, my laptop says nothing to boot from ..... I have used both LinuxMint image writer and BalenaEtcher to make the boot sticks, when I try to access the stick from Linux I get an error message as well.
I've used BalenaEtcher last week, made 4 different thumbdrives, they all boot. I booted from a Windows 10 laptop, a Panasonic CF-52, A HP Pavillion i3 running Proxmox (linux os), a Dell Server 710, two other laptops. The only thing I could not get to work was attempting to make a virtual machine of Rescuezilla inside of proxmox. I used the 64 bit Rescuezilla iso.
I have never used Proxmox, but the "Practical IT with Jeremy Leik" YouTube channel had no issues using Rescuezilla with Proxmox. You might be interested in part 4 of his tutorial: Rescuezilla Part 4 - Backup VM in Proxmox to NAS (2020). It looks like it just requires selecting the Rescuezilla ISO image file, and double-checking the boot device order.
Did you use etcher? im just some random guy on here but i have noticed that these secure boot enabled iso images cant just use any old usb maker. like fedora didnt work for me using rufus (i may have had an old version) then i tried the fedora media writer and all was well.
Hi Anonymous, and Anonymous,
Thanks for attempting to use Rescuezilla! I'm sorry it took 6 days to reply to you two -- I didn't see this forum post until now (it was stuck awaiting moderation).
I have had never had any issues at all using balenaEtcher to write the Rescuezilla image onto a USB stick and boot a computer from it. What are the specifications of your computer?
Side note to address your attached image: the message you see about /dev/sdb3 not being mountable is to be expected. If you wish to examine the root filesystem of your Rescuezilla USB stick, the correct command is to run
mount /dev/sdb /mnt(yes sdb, not sdb3). The reason is Rescuezilla image is an ISO9660 filesystem written directly onto your device (/dev/sdb) with no partition table (though within the ISO9660 filesystem there are MBR and GPT partition tables -- which I find a very strange concept). Of the 3 partitions exposed in the GPT partition table, only the EFI System Partition appears to be correctly exposed. I'm not sure why that is, but it definitely does not matter: the ESP is all that matters during EFI boot. Regardless of this, the Rescuezilla roadmap calls for getting rid of ISO9660 and move to partitioning structure with persistence (task #8), so there's no point trying to expose the other two partitions on GPT.Aside from your computer's specifications, which version of Rescuezilla did you have trouble booting? Was it the 32-bit version of 64-bit version?
Hmm. Has anybody else had issues creating a Rescuezilla USB stick using balenaEtcher?
A few hours ago, a user named 'fixit7' on the AskUbuntu stackexchange site described a similar issue.
Due to the explanation in the comment above, I am not too worried when a user tries to use their operating system's file manager to open the Rescuezilla USB stick, gets shown a message like "Wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error", because that's not how Rescuezilla is intended to be used. I am a lot more concerned if there are users who are unable to create a Rescuezilla bootable USB stick using balenaEtcher, or are unable to boot a Rescuezilla USB stick.
If you have any issues creating Rescuezilla bootable USB stick using balenaEtcher, please provide details below. (You can post anonymously if you'd like)
Last edit: Rescuezilla 2020-07-15
absolutely not.
I am that user. When I tried to boot using the pendrive, all I got was a blinking cursor.
Thanks.
Hi fixit7,
As alluded to in the comments section of your AskUbuntu question linked above, the AskUbuntu website suggested that our back-and-forth discussion be moved to the StackExchange Chat. If you would like to receive further support, please respond to my most recent reply on the StackExchange chat: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/110683/discussion-between-shasheene-and-fixit7 (or post below this comment, if you would prefer).
By the way, given that all discussion is usually of interest to the broader community, the best place to receive Rescuezilla support is this Rescuezilla Sourceforge forum.
I am having similar issues. Here is what I found.
Running the usb (created with balena-etcher) on a system with empty ssd, rescuezilla starts and works as expected. Using it on a system to create a back-up copy, the system do not see the data and hence boot from the internal SSD. I tried to plug usb on usb3 and usb2 but nothing changes.
I tried to reflash the usb (again with balena-etcher) but i get similar results.
Now I am stuck and unable to backup our system :)
We only use ubuntu 20.04 if it makes any difference.
I even tried to force booting from usb but it's like the usb is empty.
Trying same usb on an wiped out machine appears to work (it boots correctly)
Very strange as for the first day the usb worked correctly (from memory I had it in the usb3 port)
Also, strange that the system reports Low Battery when the machine is not a portable?
Anyway, hope i find a solution as it's much faster solution than clonezilla
Hi Anonymous,
It's very strange that your USB stick with Rescuezilla installed using balenaEtcher works on some machines, but not others.
It might be worth going into the BIOS configuration and temporarily turning Secure Boot off. Also try disabling "Fast Boot" option if any such option exists. Then try booting Rescuezilla and rapidly press a key like Esc/F8/F9/F12 until you can boot from BIOS. Hopefully you can boot into the Rescuezilla menu screen. Don't forget to change the BIOS settings back to the original once you have finished with Rescuezilla.
What kind of computer do you use (Dell, HP, ASUS etc?) Yes any "low battery" status for a system that does not contain a battery is not correct and I'll try to improve it.
Hopefully my suggestion above solves the problem! Let me know how you go!
Hi Rescuezilla,
I didn't expect a reply so fast, thank you so much for that. Some good news from my end and my workaround (heck it took me two days)
First, machines affected are Dell-wyse Z90D7 thin clients. We have 70 of them. We are updating the bios to latest one version 3U and for some reason the reflashing disable "ACPI P state".
I know it's quite irrelevant (well I thought so) but tonight in despair I started updating one of the older systems (with bios from 2014) surprisingly that machine booted correctly for the back-up so I dag on everything I could think of and found in Bios that ACPI default to off if upgrade is done from bios 2B but remain on from older bios. I didn't have any time to do more testing but tomorrow can replicate my findings to see if it makes sense. For us ACPI is irrelevant as the machines are always on and run containers, so they need to always be on and not going to sleep. My understanding is that ACPI should NOT affect ability to read usb especially during boot?
Anyway, I can run more tests if you need to, can spare few machines and reach bottom line of it.
So far the problem is on my side:
with the upgrade from 1A to 3U bios, acpi remains on: Rescuezilla boots and works.
with the upgrade from 2B to 3U bios, acpi goes off and Rescuezilla is not seen. (any other usb boot)
if i re-enable acpi, Rescuezilla boots normally.
Not a big drama for me as I run a script to flash bios on the go and reboot, will add acpi setting.
BTW I noticed you in Adelaide? Perth here!
Will let you know how my testing go and if you need I can run more testing if you want.
Next on my list is to enable the facility to use same usb stick to save the image and avoid having an extra ssd to plug in!
Cheers, Franco
If you have 70 network-connected computers and expect to image them with any regularity then Rescuezilla is definitely not the most time-efficient tool. There's a tool called FOG Project which can deploy an image to all 70 machines with 1 click based on a network-boot architecture. The (massive) downside of FOG Project the initial configuration is requires an IT administrator as it's a Linux tool that needs "DHCP Option 66 and 67" configured on the network's DHCP server. But if you're going to be deploying images onto a large amount of computers with any regularity then upfront cost of the IT system administrator configuring FOG Project is worthwhile. And once FOG Project is installed and configured it's pretty easy to use.
ACPI is how the operating system does configuration and power management so disabling it may cause issues. ACPI is required for plug-and-play, hotswapping and device discovery, so I wouldn't be surprised if disabling it causes issues with the detection of USB sticks.
I would also recommend staying at the most recent BIOS version and try to determine a solution. Enabling ACPI may be all that's required.
By the way, I recommend determining if your computers can "see" the USB stick in the BIOS. Usually there is a button like 'Escape' or 'F12' that allows to see a "one-time boot menu" where you can see all the devices detected by the BIOS, If it displays the model of the USB stick and its capacity then the BIOS has successfully detected the USB stick.
Ok, I can confirm that with ACPI was the cause of my issue and NOT related to Rescuezilla itself.
I had a look at the FOG project and it's very interesting but the overhead for me to get it up and running is too much. We have clusters of 8 to 12 machines (not only the wyse-dell) and deployment is not always the same. For now I am happy to keep using Rescuezilla to get things moving.
One great option (for us) would be to use the empty partition in the usb to store the 4 more used images and avoid having a secondary drive to carry images. Due to our network segmentation, I can't have a main repository running. Cheers, Franco
Hi Franco,
Your overall plan sounds reasonable!
Rescuezilla cannot yet be used to store images on the empty partition (task#8) but this feature will eventually be implemented.
Also be sure to upgrade to Rescuezilla v2.2 in a few days. It has a lot of improvements!
Great! Will check v2.2 when it comes out. Keep up the good stuff! My opinion (reading in Github): Rescuezilla is a well designed tool to backup/restore and clone machines. Your software does it well and fast. Our images are of 16/32 and 64gb ssd so pretty small and hence for me would be nice to stick the 4 most used into the same stick but my use case is not probably what most other users need so becomes irrelevant in your priority list and I agree! Also, giving option to alter the tool with persistence may end up in disaster if the "user" is not as skilled or aware of consequences. Flexibility is good and so are options but at the end of the day, if it reduce security or reliability (operator error) may no longer be efficient as it is now. Cheers, Franco
I'm having problems getting Rescuezilla to boot, as well. 64 GB USB memory stick, no fast boot or secure boot, Dell Inspiron N7110 laptop running Zorin OS.
I tried it with sudo dd via Terminal, and I tried it in the Drives application (restore from an image).
I can see the files and partitions on the drive, but when I boot, it say the boot image is corrupted. I tried it on my kid's computer, and it won't even give that, it won't even try to boot (it's a much older Compaq Presario V3000, but it can boot from USB... that's how I got Zorin OS on it).
I'm going to try another liveCD image and see if it boots.
Ok, I tried Clonezilla, using the Drives application (restore from an image)... it boots and runs just fine.
I'm not even sure Clonezilla supports what I want to do, which is to make a bootable Win7 backup by restoring a 220GB image of a 1000GB SSD with only 400GB used space onto a 480GB SSD. The reason I'm trying Rescuezilla is in case the translation is better.
Windows Backup & Restore isn't working because of some issue with the Shadow Volume service. Aomei Backupper stops at 0% and I'm not persevering with that because I've since found out it's Chinese.
Unrelated side note: I hope to officially support Ventoy, which (like Aomei Backupper as you mention) is also made in China. But the source code is open (but I haven't personally vetted it yet for binary blobs).
You may wish to raise a ticket with the makers of "Universal USB-installer" and they can add any special handling. The Rescuezilla ISO image is created using its custom own build scripts (it's not simply reusing the Clonezilla build script or the Ubuntu build scripts etc) but using the standard ISO construction application on Linux. It's possible "Universal USB-installer" have to do some special analysis to get Rescuezilla ISO images to work with that program.
I'm probably wrong, but I believe Rufus may also uses some custom extraction logic + possibly installing the GRUB bootloader, rather than doing a raw write like balenaEtcher.
Regardless, 'getting stuck on flashing cursor screen' is often an indication that your hardware is too recent for the current (ageing) Linux kernel in Rescuezilla v2.4.2 (I'll be releasing a new Rescuezilla version in the next 3 weeks). Please try the latest Rescuezilla prerelease ("2023-11-26") based on Ubuntu's Mantic verison: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/releases There's reason to believe it will boot better on your hardware due to a more recent Linux kernel.
Rescuezilla does support this: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/wiki/HOWTO:-Restoring-to-a-smaller-disk.-Eg,-1000GB-HDD-to-500GB-SSD
Rescuezilla v2.4.2 only supports this if you're shrunken your source disk before creating the image:
Clonezilla has the same limitation, but additionally you have to go into Expert mode and enable the
icdsoption and resize the partition table proportionally.Whatever tool you use, it's worth doing filesystem checks etc using Windows
chkdsk.Also be very careful to get into Clonezilla and Rescuezilla by using Windows' 'Restart' comand rather than 'Shutdown'. Because Windows filesystems have this 'hibernation' mode they go into.
Thanks so much Rescuezilla, I was able to get my backup working. It turned out I was still using an outdated version of UUI and the current version already does support Rescuezilla distinct from Clonezilla. That fixed the flashing cursor. So I suppose it was a problem with Rufus.
The improved translation/user prompts of Rescuezilla was super useful for this.
I did notice one confusing piece of text on Rescuezilla. This was about image recovery. Where it says to take care in case there have been any changes to the filesystem on the destination drive... I think it should also have said that if the destination drive is unformatted(or differently formatted) then first GParted should be used to give it similar partitions to the image that's being restored. It's like the wording assumed the image is being restored back onto the same physical disk it was imaged from.
To image a fragmented SSD while reducing the free space I found difficult. To back up from a 1TB SSD onto a 500GB SSD it should be around half of the disk. But to actually shrink the partition that space must be contiguous/consecutive and at the end of the drive. To consolidate the free space I used (in MS command prompt) defrag /U /V /X but this process requires free space of its own. E.g. from a 1TB SSD with 500GB data to a 500GB SSD with 300GB data.
I ended up removing everything from the drive that wasn't nailed down - then defragmenting, shrinking the partition, making the image, recovering the image - and finally copying everything back onto both the backup and the original drive.
But if I'd know that at the start, it would have been easier than all the time I wasted with Windows Backup trying to fix the Shadow Volume Service.
Just noting manual defragmenting is not required. When GParted is shrinking a partition it will automatically shifting the data down. This can be a slow process for almost completely full disks. But it should be acceptably fast for most disks, because not much data needs to be moved, and the data can be shifted efficiently.