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My purpose is to save/restore Clonezilla images to/from 16 GB drive.
Because images are weighty, I needed something else than FAT(32).
My choice was NTFS so I could access images from Windows machines without additional difficulties.
So here I am, trying to write Clonezilla image to an NTFS USB-drive, and I fail on both Windows and Ubuntu, for example RUFUS
says that Clonezilla's image is incompatible with NTFS partition type and suggests FAT32, and Unetbootin
just won't list a mounted USB drive which is in NTFS as a usable (to write on).
So I used mkusb
which is a nice GUI above dd
command.
The result was a blank (unpartitioned) space and a 3 MB partition.
Even though the space is "unpartitoned" (see selected line on picture)
the USB drive is still bootable (no idea why dd'ing an .iso has such an effect)
So I created a 15 GB NTFS partition on the leftovers of USB and successfully stored some Windows's partition image to this freshly made part of USB drive.
Now, when I try mounting the NTFS part of USB drive as /home/partimag
(default source directory for image saving/restoring), it asks for force mount in GUI (which has no effect), and honestly tells that "Resource sdb
is busy" in console.
However all the same works if Clonezilla is booted from a separate USB/CD
My questions:
First. Is it even possible to make Clonezilla boot AND restore images from same USB drive?
Second: Are my problems related to the fact I'm using a not-so-good dd method (I feel like sdb becomes fully busy because that bootable 200MB part with Clonezilla in the beginning of drive isn't recognized as a partition which just makes mount
lock ALL the USB drive partitions)? Or I missed something else?
P.S. this may be a stupid question, but is there a way to dd the 200mb Clonezilla image to only sdb1? I mean, maybe that would make Clonezilla normally mount the NTFS part of USB drive?
if gparted doesn't explain much, I may provide any needed output – mekkanizer – 2016-08-31T00:11:16.117
Are you talking about the drive where you install Clonezilla or the drive where you will store your backups? The first one can be FAT. – Andrea Lazzarotto – 2016-08-31T09:37:51.447
@AndreaLazzarotto I'm talking about both, I want to place bothh images and clonezilla on one drive, but because for some reason clonezilla's .iso won't write to an NTFS partition, I have to create a separate NTFS partition n the same drive The question is how to do that to prevent Clonezilla from locking ALL partitions on a USB while booting – mekkanizer – 2016-08-31T20:41:25.653
1There will be problems if you
dd
the ISO directly on top of the drive. Can you try uNetBootIn? The first partition needs to be in FAT, then after using uNetBootIn make a second one in NTFS. – Andrea Lazzarotto – 2016-08-31T22:12:30.547@AndreaLazzarotto I tried what you said and something else. No results. If I create separate parts and use UnetbootIn, it just won't boot. If I use UltraISO or RUFUS and then resize the clonezilla part to make space for NTFS part it again won't boot. For some reason those stupid pieces of software HAVE TO write the .iso to the whole disk. So the FAT32 part takes the whole drive. Maybe you can suggest a resizing method (I tried both gparted and minitool part wizard) that doesn't break the booting? – mekkanizer – 2016-09-01T14:00:20.907
Just to get it right: are you booting in EFI or legacy? – Andrea Lazzarotto – 2016-09-01T17:06:25.147
@AndreaLazzarotto Legacy. So the partition table type is MBR – mekkanizer – 2016-09-01T21:28:36.863