[Solved] Clonezilla not finding USB drive

[daveski]

I am using the newest Clonezilla and have successfully used it to clone a partition on my laptop using a friend's 16 GB USB drive.  Because that worked, I purchased a Patriot 16 GB thumbdrive.  In PCLOS, I can write and delete to the new Patriot device.  But I am not able to get Clonezilla to recognize the Patriot; I have tried it in all four USB ports on my Dell Inspiron laptop.  I have been able to get Clonezilla to recognize a DataTraveler and a Lexar device, but not a Kingston or the Patriot, and I need to use the Patriot because of its 16 GB size.  I mounted the Patriot when Clonezilla called for a USB device, but the next screen only shows sda partitions, not a sdb1, the USB drive.  Any suggestions?  Thanks,   David

[Phil]

I had something like this yesterday.

Are you using the usb as the clonezilla boot device. In which case as I am sure you know you change the bios to boot the usb hdd device (F12 boot menu).

Yesterday I booted my minipc with clonezilla (as above). When it gets to the bit asking where you are going to store images and to store stuff and you select "local devices", and it prompts you to insert your storage usb and press enter, well I put my usb storage device in, it recognised it, I pressed enter, and it did not see the usb storage device when asked. So I cancelled the process and tried again, then it saw PINKY (for that is the name of my usb storage device, not to be confused with RED, by clonezilla usb boot device). No idea why, just so.

Perhaps run some tests on the problem usb to see if it is picked up. If pclos can see and mount each usb device then they should be good for clonezilla.

Plan B - format it to ext4 rather than FAT

Plan C - how about saving the image via ssh to another box (test you can ssh as root before clonezillaring)

[daveski]

Phil, 
Regarding Plan B, how do I format a USB thumbdrive in PCLOS?

[Phil]

Hi daveski,

Reformating a usb drive is easy peasy. Take care doing this.

Insert Patriot usb
Now fire up PCC, need the root password.

PCC Configure Your Computer (icon in panel below) > Local Disks > Manage Disk Partitions

Now you van see all your devices, you need the patriot usb which may be tab sdc ? Got it, likely FAT32 format.
Click on the partition block to activate, mine has just one partition (you may need to delete other partitions on the usb drive and make just one by expanding)
Lower right toggle to expert mode
Label to say PATRIOT
Type set to Ext4
Format (point of no return, takes a while)

Job done

Try that and if still an issue try Plan C, set up ssh to another machine and store the image there.

Note when you use clonezilla the boot usb cannot be the destination location for the saved image. Wait until you tell clonezilla to use local devices and when prompted then insert the usb drive to store images. It should register and come up on the where do you want to save option. If not try again after removing PATRIOT.

[daveski]

Phil,

I got to the Manage Disk Partitions section, which was easy; but from there on it was most definitely not peasy.  The reason being that only one tab, sda, appears.  I can't get the system to recognize the USB drive in a sdb tab.  The thumb drive lights up, so its getting power from my laptop, and I can write and delete from it, but no dice from here on. Workaround?

[Phil]

Hi daveski,

Out of ideas. If it is not being recognised by the system there is something odd about it.

df in a terminal should show all mounted devices (presume it is not there)
If you are using kde the usual popup should appear asking what you want to do with it.

Perhaps do a search for the specific device in google, see if anything shows there.

I assume other usb drives appear as normal.

I am stuck, Plan C save out with ssh?
(PCC to set up ssh, ensure as a service it is up and on at boot, ensure port 22 ssh is open, type ifconfig in terminal to get IP addy, ssh say 192.168.?.? and see if you can get in (destination machine and then source machine))

Out of ideas on the usb thumb drive, probably a weird one.

[gseaman]

I've been successful formatting usb sticks with gparted, when PCC fails. I don't know if this helps, but it might be worth a try.

Galen

[daveski]

Galen,

I would like to try gparted.  Can you point me to some tutorial or how-to, because I have never used it.  Thanks,  David

[gseaman]

Install it from synaptic. I think that you will find it very intuitive. It looks like our diskdrake and gparted may have originally come from the same codebase, only gparted works in a few cases where diskdrake doesn't. If you try it, and still can't figure it out, I'll try my best to help.

Galen

[daveski]

Galen and Phil,

I installed and ran gparted and got it to format the thumb drive.  Now to see if Clonezilla will recognize it.  Thanks for your help.

David

[daveski]

It turns out that Clonezilla only recognizes a USB flash drive that has been partitioned.  With that done, it worked.  Thanks, all.

David

[gseaman]

Excellent! I am glad it worked.

Galen

[Phil]

You learn something new every day...

I did not realise gparted was in the repository. just installed it and that is what I will be using now.

ps David, on recovering an image via clonezilla go to expert mode and untick the settings messing with the mbr and microsoft stuff, two I think. It works and clonezilla has saved me many times. I notice a big update today so both of my kde machines have been backed up, just in case. Means a worry free update.