[SOLVED] [Clonezilla] Can't boot restored PC?

littlebigman · 01-10-2010, 07:29 AM

Hello

Since the Clonezilla mailing list doesn't seem very active, I figured I should ask in a Linux forum to see if someone else has experienced this issue and knows if something can be done.

On a test host, using the www.partedmagic.com live CD, I created two partitions: One to hold an OS I wish to use for testing (/sda1), and a second partition to hold images (/sda2). Unless I overlooked it, when saving /sda1 into an image file in /sda2 (ie. /dev/partimage), I was not prompted whether to include the MBR.

After trying out Windows7, I used Clonezilla to restore an XPSP3 image, and GParted to set /sda1 as Boot (ie. active, I guess). FWIW, Gparted tells me that /sda1 starts at Sector 63.

When rebooting the PC, the screen remains blank, with no error message.

Could it be that Clonezilla didn't save/restore the MBR? Does it mean that the images I made so far are all unusable? :-/

Thank you for any help.

taylorkh · 01-10-2010, 08:08 AM

If you have a bootable DOS diskette or CD you can try the command fdisk /mbr. That will I think restore the Windows boot capability of the hard drive to which you restored the image.

Ken

explodingzebras · 01-10-2010, 10:09 AM

you could try Windows Recovery Console with 'fixboot fixmbr'

littlebigman · 01-11-2010, 07:01 AM

Thanks for the help. XP prompts for the Admin password, even when the user has just hit Enter when installing it, ie. blank password :-/

I ended up using Paragon's Rescue Kit Express to fix it.

If someone knows of an open-source alternative to CloneZilla that takes care of the MBR when saving a partition into a file, I'm interested.

uncle-c · 01-11-2010, 01:46 PM

Hi LBM,
I was testing cloning partitions using CLONEZILLA just the other day. I wanted to test cloning over the network in addition to cloning to a different partition on the local computer. Both restorations worked fine. During the cloning the default option was to "SAVE THE MBR" and during restoration the default is to restore the MBR data from the clone images directory.

Code:

uncle-c@Ubuntu8-10:/mnt/backup$ ls
2010-01-06-19-img  films  lost+found  software
uncle-c@Ubuntu8-10:/mnt/backup$ cd 2010-01-06-19-img
uncle-c@Ubuntu8-10:/mnt/backup/2010-01-06-19-img$ ls
hda2.aa  hda2.ab  hda-chs.sf  hda-mbr  hda-pt.parted  hda-pt.sf  parts
uncle-c@Ubuntu8-10:/mnt/backup/2010-01-06-19-img$

2010-01-06-19-img is the directory Clonezilla created to store the cloned partition (hda2) which was split into two files. As you can see the MBR, in the form of the file hda.mbr, is also saved.
I found Clonezilla a lot more useful than Partimage, mainly because it required very little tampering to get it to clone over a network.

c

littlebigman · 01-12-2010, 02:53 AM

Thanks for the tip. I thought IMG were binary files just like PowerQuest's DriveImage would do, and didn't think they could be directories.

Still, even though CZ backs up the MBR, when restoring an image, the PC would no longer boot. I'll try and see if it's only when trying to boot Windows and /sda1 was not made active before rebooting.