Use G4L to backup vaio sz71?
 

Hi.

I'm trying to use g4l to backup a sony vaio sz71 disk to a usb disk, and i'm having some problems.

I'm using g4l 0.25 and booting the latest kernel.

The problem is that when I select the target for the image, in this case the usb disk, i get a message "mount: special device /dev/sdb does not exist"

can someone help me?

Debug:
df command only retrieves the rootfs and the /dev/root

mount command only outputs /dev/ram0, proc, sysfs, devpts

using fdisk /dev/sda i can see the partition scheme used in the notebook

using fdisk /dev/sdb i get a message: cannot open /dev/sdb

using dmesg usb|more i can see the following

scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access ST350083 0AS
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte hardware sectors (500108 MB)
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write protect is off
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte hardware sectors (500108 MB)
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write protect is off
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: sdb1
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete
usb-stor-scan used greatest stack depth: 1852 bytes left

Hi,

welcome to LQ and best of luck with your question. I split it out of the
thread you attached it to, thread-jacking is frowned upon these places.



Cheers,
Tink

Solution
 

ftp://amd64gcc.dyndns.org/g4l-v0.26alpha8.iso

In direct emails with I believe this user, or at least someone with same system the above newer version of the program was able to see the hardware. It has newer kernels, busybox, and syslinux. Not sure why the earlier version would see the /dev/sdb in the /proc/partitions, but not via fdisk.

If this is not the same user, please try the above version, and see if it works for you.

The last email I got had the follow reply.
I tried the version you advised me both 25.9 and the latest version, and everything works.

The disks are all detected and available.

Also my network card was also detected which came to a big surprise for me.

The only thing it was missing was a dhcp configuration for the card out of the box.

But everything else was perfect.

Thanks for everything.

If you need something from this version just tell me and i'll send it to you.

The notebook i'm working on is a sony vaio SZ71XN just as information for future debug

I did use G4l 0.25 to clone the hard drive for installations.
My systems were Dell optiplex 330.
At first I tried to clone internal hard drive into an external USB drive. This did not happen. This could be that G4l does not support or atlest this version does not support the destination to be USB drive.Though it detected the drive and showed it in the list of drives attached to the system.
May be you confirm if usb sticks are supported or not. Obviously, when I used the internal disks for source and destination, I had no problems what so ever to complete the task.

Reply
 

ftp://amd64gcc.dyndns.org/g4l-v0.26alpha8.iso

Has the busybox mdev to build devices, but not sure what the problem would be. I have made images to usb hard disk and flashes, but two issues that need to be recognized.

1. On the local menu option A: This is the partition on which the image is to be created or read from. Not the disk.
2. The partition must be read/write accessible. This should work with FAT32, ext2/3, and NTFS (Maybe others). The NTFS partition must have been cleanly dismounted the last time, or the ntfs-3g will not mount it in.

If you get the chance to see if this latest version works, and/or try to mount the partition from the command prompt to see if an error is reported. The Dialog menu system runs commands, but then jumps back to the menu, so this sometimes hides the error messages.

ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/local

Or whatever the device is?