Unable to restore a backup image to drive using Clonezilla
 

Hello all.

I used Clonezilla an older version not the latest to backup an entire NTFS Windows XP drive to DVD last year. I have a series of three (3) of these DVD's but now cannot restore the backup image back to the same PC. The problem is that when booting with Clonezilla I don't have an option to restore from a CD or DVD drive since the computer comes with two working CD/DVD drives that are detected by the BIOS when the POST is displayed. I used one of these drives to boot with Clonezilla and the other one containing the backup image Disk 1 of Disk 3. Clonezilla only detects the two hard drives and a USB drive which is removable. Is there a bug in the restore process because it allowed me to backup the entire image of the hard drive onto a DVD last year but this time around there are no CD or DVD drive options available to choose other then the CD drive Clonezilla was used to boot up.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Victor

I'm not sure if it will work but pretend it's a usb
usb's are connected to machine after selecting usb option then says wait 5 seconds.
Also you can go expert and use command line
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ive-cd-751267/


This is the 1 you want
http://asecurepc.com/Ubuntu%20Tutorials/Clonezilla.html

Thanks EDDY.

I will take a look at those links you have shared. Appeciate the reply. victor.

You're welcome. Search for a clonezilla live manual as it will have list of commands avaiable.

EDDY thanks again.

I tried going through the above article you have provided the link for here at http://asecurepc.com/Ubuntu%20Tutorials/Clonezilla.html. But it wasn't exactly the way it worked on my machine. I had to issue a mount /dev/cdrw1 command to get Clonezilla to recognize the CDRW. However when I got past that it started copying/restoring from the DVD that had the backuped image until it reached the 46.1% mark. At which then it said end of STDIN Error End of File found and stopped. The backup image is spanned over three (3) DVD's so I am wondering if this could be the problem that I did not let Clonezilla know that it spans across several DVD's ? I am also not sure if the one of the img.* files could be corrupted from a bad original backup or it could not detect that the image spanned across several DVD's ?

Any help would be appreciated.

P.S. I will take a look at the manual as you have suggested but I was hoping to find a quick solution to this one problem.

Somehow you'll have to issue command to do multiple dvd's. I'm pretty sure that someone else can give the exact command necessary

Thanks again.

I found out that recovery via mulit CDs or DVDs is not yet implemented. Quoting the home page limitations section it says as follows "Recovery Clonezilla live with multiple CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. Now all the files have to be in one CD or DVD if you choose to create the recovery iso file." Does anyone know how to create a single iso file from the arhives that have been spanned onto multiple DVD's ?

http://clonezilla.org/ then see where it says Limitations.

Thanks in advance

Did you create with clonezilla?
Have you checked the image to see if it's bootable restore disk

EDDY thanks again for the reply.

Yes I checked to see if I could boot with the first of the three DVD's I had made with Clonezilla but it won't boot. Checking the filesystem on the first CD shows no OS files exist that are needed in order for it to be bootable.

Well guess what its about 1:35AM in the morning here and I finally found a way to get the files I wanted for my Dad from the Clonezilla backup images. Here is the link to the website that did the trick. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=872832

Essentially following what others tried with success I decided to post the steps I used that worked but the article also covers commands for slight variations in the compression method used by Clonezilla. This is what I had to do in order to recover the files. The backup was of an entire hard drive and not just a partition whether this makes a difference when mounting the created image i don't know.

1. Installed Ububtu 9.0.4 on my PC but you can install the latest and greatest.
2. Downloaded the latest version of PartClone from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/partclone/
3. Ran the command sudo dpkg -i --force-all partclone_0.2.23_i386.deb to install PartClone
4. Copied all sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* files from DVD to /home/partimag by running the command for each DVD which had backup files on it. sudo cp /dev/cdrom/sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* /home/partimag for each DVD
5. Ran the following command cat /home/partimag/sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* | gzip -d -c | sudo partclone.restore -C -s - -O /home/partimag/hda1.img
6. Then finally ran this command sudo ntfs-3g /home/partimag/hda2.img /mnt
7. All the files were now in the /mnt directory.
8. Done.

Hope this topic can help someone else. But the annoying and frustrating thing about Clonezilla is that you can't restore from multiple DVD's back onto a hard drive. If I had known this I would I might have searched other options including keeping with Clonezilla since its free.

Victor