I used to use clonezilla all the time to make images of the partitions on my laptop's hard drive. I'm not 100% positive that this incarnation of my os partition has been visible to clonezilla, because I just rebuilt everything not that long ago. I do know that I just spent a few days trying to get clonezilla to boot from the grub menu, thanks to all those of you who helped me accomplish this! I finally got clonezilla to boot and then, like a slap across my face, I can't see my os partition to choose it as the source drive. I've gotten the impression in the past that anyone with any sense does not resort to using clonezilla. But now it's a matter of principle with me. I've invested too much time to just give in and use dd.

Can anyone explain why clonezilla doesn't see my os partition, which is completely available to other apps, like gparted and disks? I've tried 2 different versions of clonezilla. I'll try a few more while I wait for a response to this thread.

Thanks for all of your help!

This was a learning experience. I understand that a partition that is the active boot partition is locked and can't be used as a target, but I learned today that it cannot be used as a source partition either, at least with clonezilla. I'm glad that nobody replied to this thread and I can only apologize to the 34 people who viewed it. Honest mistake? Definitely a learning experience.

No need to apologise, we all need to learn - all the time.
Some-one, sometime (soon) will find this and and go "wow !".

Clonezilla uses dd or something similar to do its clone.
It refuses to do a clone of an active partition/device because there are portions of an active device that are always changing and the copy would likely be corrupted.

Glad you figured that out and we all learn by figuring out what our errors are when we encounter one. That is when we go and move on. Cheers.