Unable to boot Rescuezilla USB stick
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I have a Dell Latitude E6410 and i am unable to boot on the Rescuezilla drive. I have Ubuntu 19.3 and the drive was made with Balena Etcher and the ISO was downloaded today. I tried F2, F8 and F12 while restarting with no success.
Thanks for your help.
To enter the Dell one-time boot menu, it's recommended that you repeatedly press the F12 key during bootup:
This has been by experience, including with Dell Latitude laptops: on every computer I use, I never hold down the key, but instead repeatedly press the key until the menu appears.
I have updated the Rescuezilla website with this information.
Full disclosure: I've renamed the topic subject to "Unable to boot Rescuezilla USB stick" because the original "Unable to boot from the drive" may give users the wrong impression of the problem.
Let me know how you go!
Thanks for your help. It work with F12 a few times. At first I tried the French language option (My native tongue) and I got this error message
Error : Unknown file system
Error : You need to load the kernel first
So I rebooted and used the English menu and everything works fine.
I have another question. Once the backup is finish I open the terminal to try to reboot or shut down with no success. I used the command sudo shutdown and also Poweroff but it was not recognize.
In a future version it would be great if there was simply two buttons for SHUTDOWN and RESTART once the clone is done.
Thanks again for your help and that great software.
Andre
I will be adding automatic shutdown or reboot after backup/restore complete (task#165) at some point. By the way, there's actually a 'Shutdown' item in start menu -- there's no need to open the Terminal. But since you did open the Terminal, it's very strange that
poweroffdidn't work.It's very strange that Rescuezilla was unable to boot in the French language but worked fine in English. I know Rescuezilla has many French speaking users, and I'm able to boot into the French translation on Rescuezilla v2.1.3 without any issues. Please try booting the French version again and let me know how it goes.
I actually wonder if you may have a Rescuezilla boot media that's unreliable for some reason. Eg, due to accidentally bumping and momentarily disconnecting the Rescuezilla USB stick, or the machine not providing enough power, or the USB stick going bad etc. Such a root cause would explain both the issues you experienced.
Also, once you have used Rescuezilla for a little while, please consider giving Rescuezilla a "like" on AlternativeTo!
Dell Latitude 9520 with Windows 10 Pro. Using F12 I can see all boot options except USB with Rescuezilla, but if I go to Boot Configuration in BIOS, I can see it. The only way, however, to add it to the boot menu is by selecting "Browse for file..". I can see the entire folder structure of USB but which file should I select?
Thanks!
Never mind. Was finally able to see the USB drive with Rescuezilla, by following instructions to remove Safe Boot option and a few other parameters as noted in another thread. I wish Rescuezilla would show how much space is needed on target drive. I assume it would at least say something like - insufficient space on target...
Thank you!
Glad to hear the Rescuezilla USB stick booted for you, but I don't quite understand what you needed to do for your Dell Latitude 9520.
The stick should appear in the F12 boot menu. Any "Browse for file" option is to directly select a EFI bootloader, which is something you should not need to do. And there should be no need to change any Secure Boot settings. There should be at least one entry for the USB stick in the F12 one time boot menu (possibly a second entry if Legacy Boot is enabled). And selecting that should boot in the Rescuezilla language selection menu.
If possible, please clarify the exact workaround you used as it might help other people.
Yep, that feature request is captured by task #253 (Rescuezilla backup reportedly hangs when disk space runs out) and will finally be implemented in Rescuezilla v2.3.
Sounded like secure boot was enabled in bios, which needs to be disabled to
boot any USB device.
EDIT by Rescuezilla: Removed Sourceforge email quoting of entire previous comment.
Last edit: Rescuezilla 2021-08-30
Maybe the user did disable Secure Boot, but disabling Secure Boot shouldn't ever be required to boot Rescuezilla.
You are correct. No need to disable anything. This is the latest Dell UEFI BIOS, less than 2 months old. I re-enabled everything back to default and it worked just fine. For some reason USB didn't show up in my boot menu as expected like on my old computers as a USB, rather as a Generic boot drive (the very last option of several listed). Once I clicked on that, Rescuezilla loaded without any problems. So much nicer and easier to use than Clonezilla! Fewer steps, better interface.
I look forward to resolving task #253 :) That's exactly what happened (Rescuezilla got stuck and had to do a cold [re]boot).
On a side note - any way to enlarge fonts on a 4K laptop?
Thanks again, keep the good work!
The easiest way to enlarge fonts on a 4K laptop is to open the "ARandR" icon on the Desktop, right click on the window, change the resolution to say, 1920x1080 and then click 'Apply'.
(For advanced Linux users, I will mention that technically the DPI settings can be modified by editing the /home/ubuntu/.Xresources file in a text editor, changing the DPI setting from 100 to let's say 200. Then running
systemctl restart lightdmto apply the settings. This is definitely much more difficult than just lowering the resolution using ARandR.)At some point I will implement a better solution task #133: Improve readability on high-resolution screens (HiDPI), but it's still not a high priority compared to other tasks: the ARandR solution seems to work well enough for now.
Beautiful! Thank you!