[SOLVED] Clonezilla live is busting my ...

For many years I have used Clonezilla for cold OS backups. It has saved me MANY times from bad updates etc. For a number of my machines I run the OS (CentOS7, Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 20.3) from 32 GB USB flash drives. A number of reasons I will not go into for now.

I just got a new entry level Intel NUC. I burned a cloned image of a Mint machine (gateway, firewall, VPN sharing) onto a brand new 32 GB flash drive. So far, so good. I booted the new NUC and made some changes to NIC mac addresses etc., tested it and declared it ready for production. Final step was to burn a backup.

Clonezilla tells me there are bad sectors on the flash drive.

fsck - no problems
Ran

badblocks -w -s -o error.log /dev/sdX

for over an hour. Several passes with different patterns. No errors.
Used dd to make an image of the flash drive. No complaints.
Formatted the flash drive with overwrite. No complaints.
Tried to image a couple of other flash drives - errors reported by Clonzilla.
Repeated tests with the latest "alternate" (Ubuntu based) Clonezilla live. Same issue.

Finally... The Intel NUC does not detect a bootable drive when I attempt to boot it from the Clonezilla live flash drive. It does show bootable when I examine it and it boots other machnines.

Any suggestions?

TIA,

Ken

MBR? UEFI? Secure Boot?

One of the above, probably Secure Boot

Sounds like a firmware / bios issue on the NUC. If it will boot some devices but not others then it seems that it is not properly reading the device boot sector.

Thanks fatmac,

Secure boot is turned off on the NUC. It is booting with UEFI. It boots a Mint image burned to a USB flash drive with Disks just fine. But not Clonezilla.

Thanks computersavvy,

I am cloning one of my 32 GB USB drives with the NUC OS on another machine with Redo Rescue. It created the image no complaint. I am now burning it back to the flash drive. When I am done I will see if the Redo Rescue flash drive will boot the NUC and make sure the saved and restored image still works on the NUC.

Ken

Update:

My first attempt failed. I think I selected to restore all partitions rather that a COMPLETE restore. I did another create image and complete restore to a second USB drive which now boots the NUC just fine. It appears I have a workable solution.

I have no idea what is going on with Clonezilla. It has been my standby for MANY years. Now if I could remember what I was supposed to be working on.

I am marking this thread resolved although it should be half resolved. This beggars belief...

I use a Dell Inspiron 3050 Micro (NUC size PC) with a 1 TB internal drive as my image storage box. I use Clonezilla to take images of Linux installs on USB flash drives and MicroSD cards (for Raspberry Pi). It has worked great for a long time. The box has ONE USB3 port which I have always used for the device being imaged as I figure it is faster and boot Clonezilla from a USB2 port as it is on a USB2 flash drive. That configuration is what was failing me as described above.
hLast night I decided to try cloning a flash drive from a USB2 port. Worked great multiple times and I restored an image to a flash drive in the USB2 port. No problems. Is the is the answer? NO. This morning I have been imaging and burning to the USB3 port as usual. Same flash drives. No problems reported. Perhaps some corrosion on the USB3 connector in the computer? Perhaps but I had tried the process on an idenical computer yesterday and got the bad sector message from Clonezilla. Perhaps I should not image flash drives on Monday

As to the NUC not booting from Clonezilla... I have read that NUCs are somewhat picky in booting from USB. I will play with that some more when I have time. In the interim I have found redorescue to work well.

Thanks again for the input.

Ken

This is starting out as a week for self inflicted problems

The NUC booting is resolved. On my bench I have a USB hub with the transceivers for my wireless keyboard and mouse plugged in. When I want to fire up a machine I plug that hub in - easier than fumbling with the two tiny transceivers and less likely to loose them. I was installing some VPN software on a couple of NUCs and I had the .deb files, credentials, some scripts etc. on a flash drive for convenience. I had that flash drive plugged into the hub so it would be available when the new machine booted.

It seems that the NUC saw that flash drive first, determined that it was not bootable and simply gave me the digital bird rather than examine any other USB storage devices. I removed the non-bootable flash drive from the hub and Clonezilla boots just fine

This thread is truly resolved - even if I do not know the root cause of the bad sectors issue.

Ken

Originally Posted by taylorkh This is starting out as a week for self inflicted problems The NUC booting is resolved. On my bench I have a USB hub with the transceivers for my wireless keyboard and mouse plugged in. When I want to fire up a machine I plug that hub in - easier than fumbling with the two tiny transceivers and less likely to loose them. I was installing some VPN software on a couple of NUCs and I had the .deb files, credentials, some scripts etc. on a flash drive for convenience. I had that flash drive plugged into the hub so it would be available when the new machine booted. It seems that the NUC saw that flash drive first, determined that it was not bootable and simply gave me the digital bird rather than examine any other USB storage devices. I removed the non-bootable flash drive from the hub and Clonezilla boots just fine This thread is truly resolved - even if I do not know the root cause of the bad sectors issue. Ken

I would be willing to wager that the use of the external USB hub was the main factor. The bios had to configure it in addition to the internal devices and thus it seems possible that something was improperly configured by the bios.

USB from the bios is intended to support keyboard, mouse, flash drives, etc, but is not intended to support chained hubs as you are using. Specifically, the bios on a PC is designed to support the hardware installed on the motherboard, but not all additional hardware beyond that necessary to boot.

Thanks computersavvy,

As I recall, Windows NT 3.51 did not support USB so I did not buy anything USB. Since I had nothing USB I did not care that NT did not support USB. USB, especially flash drives, present a tremendous attack surface. Think Stuxnet. The NUC would boot from a Mint Mate 20.3 install ISO on a flash drive or from the redorescue live flash drive WHILE I HAD THE DATA FLASH DRIVE IN THE HUB. Clonezilla Live - no. Who knows. At least now I have a working solution.

Thanks again for your insightful comments.

Ken