Hello altogether

could you help me with a strange problem?

First of all the technical info:

I´ve been using clonezilla for quite a while now. I use it for backing up my entire disk (1 TB). Formerly I used to have 2 partitions and everything went well.
As of late I have a third partition for storing the data of virtual machines (amongst other stuff).
If I remember correctly that also went well one or two times. But recently I´ve got problems when trying to make a disk-backup.

/dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdc2: that´s alright.

But when it comes to /dev/sdc3 clonezilla says something about the respective partition not being cleanly unmounted and gives an error-message.
After that I booted up my system and unmounted /dev/sdc3 manually hoping that it would be o.k. that way.
Then: new try, but again: the same error-message.

Well, I´can´t imagine why that is. As to my recollection I´ve done nothing wrong.
What baffles me quite a bit is: why on earth is the third partition (and just this one) not cleanly unmmounted?
And: is there a way/command for doing that manually?


Could you help?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Greetings.
Rosika

Try running fsck on the file system. That should clean it up.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi AwesomeMachine,

thanks for your help. It worked.
As a matter of fact clonezilla offers me the following option before saving the image:
There´s even a hint for that on http://drbl.org/faq/fine-print.php?p...an_mounted.faq .
After using this option the backup succeeded.

I assume I could run the fsck-command on the respective partition while my system is running (of course un-mounting it first) - before proceeding to use clonezilla.

But there´s one thing I don´t understand:
Why is that very partition not cleanly unmounted in the first place?
My root- and home-partition don´t seem to be affected by that phenomenon.

Greetings
Rosika

Your welcome.

I don't know why it's doing that.

Hi again,

never mind.
It seems I´m not the only one who has to deal with "not cleanly unmounted FS" as I´ve seen this topic discussed on various sites on the internet. But never has there been any discussion as to why that is.

At least I´ve got a method to deal with it now.

Cheers.
Rosika

*****UPDATE*****

In the meantime I contacted support for clonezilla via sourceforge.net (discussions).
Arthur Tromp told me:
So this is probably the reason for the problem.
I have no entry for my third partition within fstab due to the fact that I created that one at a later point in time.
But: the third partition is automatically mounted when I boot up my system. I´m not quite sure why that is.

Greetings.
Rosika

I think problems like yours are probably common. Back in 2013 (I guess), ubuntu and ubuntu derivatives had a wrong count on blocks and on inodes. Clonezilla wouldn't image them. Back then the fix was at one point you're asked to choose:

Beginners mode: Accept the default options

Expert mode: choose your own options.

I always go with the expert mode ever since. When choosing options I go with default except the choices:

sfsck: skip checking/repairing file system

fsck: interactively check and repair source file system before saving. I go with this one every time and don't have any problems.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi DVOM,

thanks for your suggestion. I think I´ll go that way too.

As far as the automatic mounting of /dev/sdc3 is concerned Arthur Tromp said
Well, as a matter of fact my Lubuntu system actually is installed on an external USB harddrive (Western Digital WD Elements 25A2). So this seems to explain it.

Greetings.
Rosika