Resizing mysterious partition written by DDing an ISO file

Question

I downloaded clonezilla and then wrote it to a USB flash drive with this:

dd if=clonezilla.iso of=/dev/sdb

I've confirmed that the system boots and clonezilla runs from the flash drive.

I want to store a clonezilla backup on the same flash drive clonezilla is running on, but I tried it and ran out of space, so I started looking at how to resize the mysterious partition type that was generated from the ISO.

fdisk -l /dev/sdb
....
Device      Boot  Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *         1         111      113664   17  Hidden HPFS/NTFS
....

I've tried using ntfsresize from the Debian ntfsprogs package.

I'm trying gparted next, but thought I'd ask here if anyone knows a neat way to resize a partition created on flash from a liveCD image.

Thanks in advance
Jon

ps. Assume Debian 6 please.

Answer 1

There really aren't any "neat" ways to do what you're asking. GParted is the modern way to do basically everything partition-related; it even supports GPT, etc.

Are you sure that clonezilla will run when simply dded to a flash drive? Usually, .iso's use syslinux or isolinux to chainload from the CD drive. If there isn't a CD in there, it will usually get confused and not boot. Try using unetbootin, a graphical startup USB creator, to install it to a flash drive. Of course, maybe the Clonezilla iso is a specialized format, etc, that can recognize what it's booting off of or something.

Regardless, GParted will be able to resize both of those partition types (standard FAT32 created by unetbootin or pendrivelinux) or ISO9660 from the ISO (CD filesystem format).

Answer 2

You will probably have better luck making the clonezilla flash drive with the official method of using tuxboot. You should be able to use the flashdrive as well that way.

Surprised dd works at all.