Not sure where to post this, but I wanted to share the love for Clonezilla as well as post a mini-howto where Googler's can find it.
After replacing a motherboard, my Debian 8 box would not boot. This is my primary workstation for development, sysadmin stuff, etc... so this was a big deal. The motherboard had to be replaced because it was new (from Amazon), but right out of the box, one of the memory slots was bad. Amazon didn't have anymore stock, so I had to wait... they give you 30 days, and long story short, I had to buy a replacement locally at the last minute to ensure I was able to return the bad board to Amazon. I powered down via a normal shutdown, swapped the new Asus Sabertooth X99 for the old one, put everything back together, and powered on. It wouldn't boot. Of course, I wasted a lot of time unsure about whether or not this was a motherboard problem or a system problem. Since the system had been working fine to that point, I wasted several hours screwing around with secure boot and other options before finally deciding it was probably the OS. Repairing the EFI / boot partition failed. Grub was dead. Nothing worked. Enter Clonezilla. I decided to clone /dev/sda2, my root partition, as a backup, and re-install. I figured: "I should be able to re-install, then restore that partition to the root, and get everything back." I cloned /dev/sda2 without issue to two places: a spare internal drive and an external drive (just in case), then reinstalled Debian 8.1. Once it was up and booting, I tried to restore /dev/sda2 from the backup, but the new installation of the OS was 10GB too small, and Clonezilla didn't want to do the restore (Frustrating - Steven, why is that? Old versions of Ghost would let you size / re-size the restore. Why doesn't CZ? ). I powered down, and booted up with a live ISO on USB (Debian 8.1 Live), fired up gparted, and looked at the partition table. I decided I could steal 10GB from the swap partition. So, I delete the swap partition and the root partition, then added them back in with the correct size. (When CZ complained that the root file system partition was too small, it gave me the exact size it "used to be", which was very helpful here). Then, I created a swap partition with the remaining space. Now, restoring /dev/sda2 worked without issue. But we still weren't home-free. The restore worked, and the system booted, but it immediately went into emergency mode because "Dependency failed for local file system" - among other things. I figured it couldn't find the swap partition since I killed the one created at install time. So, via rescue mode, I checked /etc/fstab and compaired the UUIDs there with blkid, and sure enough (as I suspected) the swap partition UUID was different since I had stolen space from the originally installed one. When I deleted it and created a new one, it got a new UUID (as it should have). So, I just changed the UUID value for the swap partition, saved, and rebooted. The system came up without issue, and 5 minutes later, I was writing this email to thank Steven for Clonezilla and put this out there for anyone else Googling around on how to fix a broken system. -- Michael Munger, dCAP, MCPS, MCNPS, MBSS High Powered Help, Inc. Microsoft Certified Professional Microsoft Certified Small Business Specialist Digium Certified Asterisk Professional mich...@highpoweredhelp.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Clonezilla-live mailing list Clonezilla-live@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/clonezilla-live
