Test Clonezilla image recovery

Question

I have successfully created a backup image of my laptop's hard drive using CloneZilla. Before making system changes I want to verify that the backup is fully restorable and can be booted from.

I have successfully restored the image to an external USB drive and tried booting from that, however it always seems to load the copy of windows 8.1 from the local disk (to check, I made a simple change to the desktop background after the backup operation). I have tried disabling the boot option in the BIOS for the local disk but I suspect it is reading the MBR GPT boot information from the external drive, then using that information to load the file system on the local disk (please correct that assumption if it's wrong) There is no option in the BIOS to disable the local disk entirely.

I then tried booting from the external disk on an isolated PC and I get a blinking cursor (HAL/Driver problem?)

I've also tried using VirtualBox to boot from the USB device using both;

• a restore of the backup image
• and a disk-to-disk clone

Both of these result in a "no bootable medium found" message from VirtualBox.

Clearly I don't want to perform an actual restore to the local disk, in case the backup isn't fully functional.

How can I test that the CloneZilla backup I've created is recoverable in a safe environment?

Update

Starting afresh, I recovered the backup image to the external drive again. When plugging it in Disk Manager reports an error

The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online

Here's what it looks like when the disk is brought online.

I wonder if the "Bring Online" operation is causing partition flags to be lost? If that's not the case then shouldn't CloneZilla be replicating these attributes as part of the backup?

Answer 1

The "not a bootable disk" on the clones makes it sound as though the boot flag hasn't been set on that.

How do I check if the boot flag is set?

Good question. diskpart is your friend:

1. Start a regular command prompt and run diskpart from that; or you can run diskpart from the Start menu or diskpart.exe directly. It will ask for admin access.

2. list volume will list volumes and their flags. The boot flag show up under the info column:

   

   Here you can see my C: volume has the boot flag set, but the removable drive (E:)¹ does not.

How to set boot flag on partition using bootsect

So, let's assume your backup image is accessible (but not bootable) under the letter E:, you can verify the files are there but see that it's not got the bootflag set using diskpart. well, you can use bootsect to set the boot flag².

1. Start an administrative command prompt from the Win+x (Power User Menu)

2. G:

3. cd boot

4. bootsect /nt60 G:

Done!

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¹ I think that's a Debian netinst partition...

² or switch between old style ( < Vista) and newer; see the Technet page for more info