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[TheGermanEngie]

Hey all -

 

I'm having some issues with the program Clonezilla when trying to restore my SSD. I've been playing around with it and made a copy of my OS (mint 18.3 saved on an HDD) so I can play around with other non-Linux operating systems.

 

Recently I've tried doing a partition-partition copy BACK to the SSD from the larger HDD. I have the copy stored on and upon reboot it gives me "error 1962: no operating system found. Press any key to reboot sequence". This was after I installed Windows 10 on the SSD and wiped it in Gparted back to a clear EX4 format as I have done in the past.

 

Now the way Clonezilla works is the source drive in total size has to be the same size or smaller than the target drive regardless of data size being transferred since Clonezilla copies all sectors on the physical drive. However you cannot copy data from a larger drive (not even miniscule partitions that could obviously fit) to a smaller drive (again, Clonezilla does sector by sector). However I've gotten around this problem by manually shrinking the partition to as small as it can get in Gparted after it finishes copying to the HDD so I can copy back to the smaller SSD without any size compatibility problems. It's worked flawlessly until I wiped W10 and it's giving me this error.

 

The weird part is when I go to reinstall from DVD it detects that Mint is "already installed" and I have the option to "install Mint 18.3 next to 18.3". It says it's installed but when I boot it says no OS... so lost here. Please help!

 

(note I chose partitions because I have personal data on a separate NTFS partition)

[vorticalbox]

The install will see mint there, I believe the problem is grub is pointing to the wrong place and therefore cannot find the copied back os.

 

I'm afraid I have no idea how to fix this, but it should be a starting point.

[Granular]

Was it a legacy BIOS or UEFI install?

On a typical UEFI install, Mint creates a ~500MB FAT formatted partition, mounted at /boot/efi, storing the bootloader's configuration. If you didn't back that up along with the root partition, you will need to recreate it and reinstall GRUB.

 

Personally, I've successfully done that by following IBBoard's answer from this thread.

[TheGermanEngie]

Just now, Granular said:

Was it a legacy BIOS or UEFI install?

On a typical UEFI install, Mint creates a ~500MB FAT formatted partition, mounted at /boot/efi, storing the bootloader's configuration. If you didn't back that up along with the root partition, you will need to recreate it and reinstall GRUB.

 

Personally, I've successfully done that by following IBBoard's answer from this thread.

Clonezilla is legacy based if I remember correctly, but it shouldn't really matter. It backed up the whole SSD, sector by sector, the whole 248GB drive. Could I boot from a USB into a live distro and update GRUB through the terminal?

[Granular]

1 hour ago, TheGermanEngie said:

Clonezilla is legacy based if I remember correctly, but it shouldn't really matter. It backed up the whole SSD, sector by sector, the whole 248GB drive. Could I boot from a USB into a live distro and update GRUB through the terminal?

Yeah. If it backed up all partitions, it should have also backed up the /boot/efi partition.

Booting into a live session of Mint and running the Disks utility should let you get an idea of what's on the drive.

[TheGermanEngie]

21 hours ago, Granular said:

Yeah. If it backed up all partitions, it should have also backed up the /boot/efi partition.

Booting into a live session of Mint and running the Disks utility should let you get an idea of what's on the drive.

I'm not sure if it backed up all partitions... sda1 includes the swap space and boot partition, correct? It's a dropdown menu under sda1 but it doesn't have an assigned sd(number)(letter) itself.

[Fleetscut]

the problem with boot sectors is that they need to be a very specific size, and need to start at the first byte on the disk. If clonezilla messed this up when copying then your bios will have no boot sector to read from and have no idea that any of the partitions are bootable.

 

Start up a live instance of linux and then do a listing of all the partitions on the disk you are using. Check to make sure that the boot partition exits, that it is at the very beginning of the disk, and that its marked as a boot partition. If its missing or not set up properly you will need to recreate your boot partition. If you are going to be using windows on the disk, its probably best to let the windows repair tools do this. Otherwise if you are going to be using a different boot loader just follow any linux install guide to re do the boot partition

[TheGermanEngie]

8 hours ago, Fleetscut said:

the problem with boot sectors is that they need to be a very specific size, and need to start at the first byte on the disk. If clonezilla messed this up when copying then your bios will have no boot sector to read from and have no idea that any of the partitions are bootable.

 

Start up a live instance of linux and then do a listing of all the partitions on the disk you are using. Check to make sure that the boot partition exits, that it is at the very beginning of the disk, and that its marked as a boot partition. If its missing or not set up properly you will need to recreate your boot partition. If you are going to be using windows on the disk, its probably best to let the windows repair tools do this. Otherwise if you are going to be using a different boot loader just follow any linux install guide to re do the boot partition

Ok... I have no idea what just happened now. Here's what I did

 

DBAN'd the SSD.

Copied the saved partition back to the SSD from the HDD.

Wouldn't boot.

Tried re installing GRUB through a Live-CD. Nothing.

Bit the dust and reinstalled Linux Mint 18.3.

After install upon reboot a GRUB menu came up asking for multiple versions of Mint. Chose the second option.

Boom. All my stuff is here. Same exact distro.

 

(?????????????)

 

someone please explain

 

Edit: I think I know what happened but I could be wrong. Someone correct me if needed.

 

When originally cloning in clonezilla I chose partition to partition and chose sda1, not realizing that the extended and swap partitions were sda2. 

 

I was unable to boot into mint because I only had sda1 and not the swap, extended space etc.

 

When I "reinstalled" mint I chose to wipe the disk and do a new install. Somehow and idk why I guess it copied a new extended partition with swap to my original sda1 partition with all my stuff.

 

My original Linux boots but I have a spare fresh install of mint on another partition. It doesn't show up in Gparted for some reason.

[linuxgod]

Could be because you DBAN a SSD which is not good for it, if you want to start from scratch just use cfdisk to delete any partitions and then "sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/yourHDD" and reinstall your OS.

[TheGermanEngie]

52 minutes ago, linuxgod said:

Could be because you DBAN a SSD which is not good for it, if you want to start from scratch just use cfdisk to delete any partitions and then "sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/yourHDD" and reinstall your OS.

Guess what. I'm a fuckin idiot. The last time I cloned a drive successfully I did drive to drive, not partition to partition. Just got an option if I wanted to clone the bootloader. Yes please... holy fuck

 

i'll try this next time with a GPT partition instead of MBR so I won't have to deal with this bullshit later. Well. You live and you learn.