Clonezilla Cannot See SSD Partitions in Win10 v1903

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I acquired two Acer laptops recently with 1TB platter drives. Clonezilla 2.4.2 has allowed me to copy the partition containing C:\ to a Samsung T5 SSD without problems. Now I’ve had to replace my Win7 PC with a new Acer that has a 512GB SSD drive instead of the platter type. All three PCs are running Win10-1903. Now the problem is that CZ cannot see any source partitions but does see the destination local drive, the T5. The message says the kernel may be  too old but I’ve also tried the latest CZ  with no success. What can I do to solve this problem with CZ or is there another program that will work just as well? I have numerous backups and prefer not to abandon CZ, but will if I have to for the new Acer.

 

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My guess is your new machine may have an NVMe drive. This thread may help.

https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/bugs/289/

Haven’t used Clonezilla in years. I use Acronis and Macrium Reflect

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doriel

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Thanks for the clue. I checked the hardware with HWInfo and it is an NvMe drive. I’ll look into the suggestions in the link you provided.

I prefer an imaging approach using an external boot device, like CZ, in case the internal drive is so [damaged], it won’t boot or run right. A bad Win10 monthly update is a good example. The laptops image correctly from GPT to a Fat32 SSD.

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Following that link one step further leads to this discussion.

https://jasoncoltrin.com/2018/02/09/how-to-clone-a-dell-optiplex-7050-m-2-nvme-hard-drive-with-clonezilla-and-an-external-usb-hdd/

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Read what Wesley had in the comments regarding secure boot etc., or, install Macrium, create boot usb drive and image with it

 

Worked for me! I shortened it as follows for my team:

Taking an Image or burning an image to 5490 laptop with NVMe SSD
1. Start laptop and repeatedly tap F2 to get into BIOS
2. Under General, UEFI Boot Path Security, change it from “Always except Internal HDD” to Never
3. Under System Configuration, SATA Operation, change from “Raid On” to AHCI
4. Under Secure Boot, Secure Boot Enable, change from Enabled to Disabled
5. Save all changes and restart the laptop and take or burn image with Clonezilla as normal

After image is burned or copied, reverse the bios settings so the laptop can function:
6. Under General, UEFI Boot Path Security, change it from Never to “Always except Internal HDD”
7. Under System Configuration, SATA Operation, change from AHCI to “Raid On”
8. Under Secure Boot, Secure Boot Enable, change from Disabled to Enabled
9. Restart laptop and test that Windows is bootable

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Arctic_Eddie wrote:

I prefer an imaging approach using an external boot device

Acronis and Macrium can do that, as can lots of other backup apps.

I choose to backup from within Windows for convenience and have never had an issue with a backup created this way.

cheers, Paul

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JohnW

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I’ve got secure boot disabled now and can boot the normal windows or the clonezilla USB stick. The other two settings, I’ve not seen before, but never looked. What happens if I leave them in never and ahci?

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If you are booting windows OK I assume you had ahci before. You can leave as-is if you like. Secure Boot just adds an extra level of security. I have machines set up both ways.

https://www.howtogeek.com/116569/htg-explains-how-windows-8s-secure-boot-feature-works-what-it-means-for-linux/

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I do not have a Raid device but I do need to do the monthly images before the W10 updates at the first of the month for the previous month. I also need to boot Mint Linux on a stick for testing. I’ll try it tomorrow and see how it goes. This is a new PC so I initially image all partitions then only the main(C:\) thereafter.

Thanks all for the help and links.

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All of our (since 2015) Windows and Linux computers are set up as RAID although none have true RAID arrays.  If I remember correctly, it’s a RAID 0 configuration.  They won’t work, in fact I bricked one of them and spent forever fixing it after changing to AHCI.  Our older computers, 2012 and older, all operate in AHCI mode.  That’s about when BIOS changed to EUFI and things became a bit more confusing.

Clonezilla’s always worked well for me, it’s so simple.  We have every kind of drive available, NvMe’s, SATA SSD’s, hybrid and traditional platter drives. We do have to play with the EUFI settings to allow the utility access.  CZ won’t clone to a smaller partition than the source.

Take a look at CZ’s limitations here:
https://clonezilla.org/

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I looked into the BIOS settings and it’s set for RST with Optane. The only other choice is AHCI. I’ll try it and see what happens.

 

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[Paul T]

AHCI will probably brick Windows because the disk interpretation is different.

RAID is likely the default because using Optane chips probably requires it be turned on – Intel licensing.
It is supposed to improve performance, but it’s too expensive for most users and has effectively been superceded by cheap M2 NVMe drives.

cheers, Paul

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Paul T.

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doriel

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Paul T wrote:

AHCI will probably brick Windows because the disk interpretation is different.

Though only until you turn it back.

So it’s possible to turn that to AHCI, run a Clonezilla image and store it somewhere, then switch back to RAID mode and use Windows again.

And if you ever need to restore the Clonezilla image, switch to AHCI mode again while doing that and then back to RAID mode for running…

Alternatively it’s possible to convert a Windows installation to use AHCI mode if you don’t have any “fancy” storage arrangements that depend on the RAID mode, but might not bother just for imaging.

Paul T wrote:

RAID is likely the default because using Optane chips probably requires it be turned on – Intel licensing.
It is supposed to improve performance, but it’s too expensive for most users and has effectively been superceded by cheap M2 NVMe drives.

Usually doesn’t have to be Optane to use a drive for cache. Large slow spinning drive + cheap NVMe drive can be a perfectly valid combination, depending on specifics. (Never quite found a list of exactly which specifics – it works on some devices, not all.)

On some motherboards it can also be used to do RAID1 or RAID0 between 2 drives.

(Built some instrumentation rigs the other year, RAID1 asked for, “power desktop” chassis. On a Fujitsu chassis the default Fujitsu NVMe drive as a cache for 2 large add-on spinning drives in RAID1 was just fine, on a HP with the advertised “HP Z Turbo Drive” and 2 large add-on spinning drives it just wouldn’t turn on caching.)

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Macrium Reflect (free) creates rescue media that boots WinPE with a GUI version of Reflect from USB flash. It works well for making an image with the computer’s OS offline, as well as restoring an image.

I’ve used Clonezilla before, but Macrium is no-brainer simple to use by comparison!

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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SkipH

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When I saw that the setting had to do with memory then I stopped there until further comments. I’ll look into the Macrium Reflect (free) solution. I’m really impressed with the performance of my new Acer TC-885 UA92 PC and don’t want to wreck it and have to start over. Some of my apps are installed but I want an active partition image before proceeding. My two laptops, Acer A315-41, already have CZ images so I’ll continue the same with them.

 

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Macrium Free installed OK. Made images of partitions 1, 2, and 4, all non active at the moment. Also made rescue ISO which I assume I can put on a GPT stick with Rufus. Partition 3 remains, C:\. Since that partition is active with file contents changing, I wonder how it can get an accurate and reusable image. Are there any known problems with this method?

 

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Arctic_Eddie wrote:

Partition 3 remains, C:\. Since that partition is active with file contents changing

C is the important part to backup unless you want to fresh install Windows in case of crash, buggy update…

You should do 1 full image backup of your whole PC (including EFI partition, recovery partition..) not partition by partition.
You add daily/weekly… incremental/differential.. backup.

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Arctic_Eddie wrote:

Partition 3 remains, C:\. Since that partition is active with file contents changing, I wonder how it can get an accurate and reusable image. Are there any known problems with this method?

Windows uses Shadow Copy to get around this, enabling live backups. Been around since Windows XP, so it is very reliable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy

Shadow Copy (also known as Volume Snapshot Service, Volume Shadow Copy Service or VSS) is a technology included in Microsoft Windows that can create backup copies or snapshots of computer files or volumes, even when they are in use.

If you don’t trust that, then alternatively you can boot from the Macrium rescue USB and run the backup from that. That will ensure that the Windows volume will not be changing, as it is offline when you boot the system externally. Same method as Clonezilla in that regard.

In any case, as was mentioned earlier, you will need to image all of the partitions on the Windows system drive together, i.e. the whole disk, to get a usable image of that disk, that you can restore in one restore job.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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I almost always image the whole disk (depends on my disk layout). I’m not a fan of incremental/differential in my drive images (one bad one and you’re in a world of heck) . Generally, I do a drive image before major updates, then daily or weekly, do incremental/differential file backups with another backup program. I can restore my latest disk image, copy over my incremental/differential file backups and be back in business.

Not a big fan of doing disk images within windows, but I do it on remote systems that I service and, knock on wood, haven’t had an issue yet.

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(one bad one and you’re in a world of heck)

True for incremental backups, but not differential ones.

Zig

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True, unless you have a bad differential or two and your data files are included!

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Zig wrote:

(one bad one and you’re in a world of heck)

True for incremental backups, but not differential ones.

Zig

No different from one bad full image.
This should never happen with a reliable backup software that includes checking backup files integrity.

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Alex5723 wrote:

This should never happen with a reliable backup software that includes checking backup files integrity.

Just fyi – that check is ‘off’ by default in Macrium Reflect.

The setting is available under “Advanced Settings” in each backup definition file.

 

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Follow up to my comment on Macrium Reflect and image integrity checking:

I added the image integrity check to my Macrium Reflect daily image tonight.

The daily image (full) of my 500GB C: system drive SSD normally takes about 40 mins, without the check after the image, with the target drive being a USB external spinner.

The check added about 30 additional minutes to the process, while the external drive ran at 100% during the check. I was able to use the computer to multi-task OK during this time as the other system resources were not heavily impacted.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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thank for this thread, really helped!!
AHCI seem to be the primary factor here while going through the “adventure”….
on my 2021 XPS 15 9500, disabling secure boot altogether kept freexzing CZ boots.  i had to keep enabled, but set to “Audit mode”.  i agree that this makes little to no sense.

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