Clonezilla behaving badly
QI have been using Clonezilla successfully for years as a backup system for Linux, Windows & FreeDOS on a PC with a single 500GB drive. Recently my Windows partition was running out of space, so I added a 2TB (sdb) drive to my existing 500GB (sda), reformatted and repartitioned both drives and reinstalled everything. I now have FreeDOS (sda1), Windows 7 (sda2), Kubuntu 12.04 (sdb1), Kubuntu 14.04 (sdb2), /home (sdb5) and Grub installed on sda.
When I was happy with everything I used Clonezillalive2.4 to back up the above partitions to an external USB drive, and it even verified that the images were restorable. Recently I have had cause to need to restore both my Windows 7 and Kubuntu 14.04 partitions, but on both occasions Clonezilla responded with: The image was saved from more than 1 disk. To restore the image to different disk names is not supported for more than 1 disk! Only the same disk names will work.
It suggested I try using cnvt-ocs-dev, but I cannot find any information about this. I am only attempting to restore each image to the original location it was created from, not to a different disk or partition as this would seem to suggest. Colin Morley
AClonezilla images are intended to be restored to the same partition name from which they were created. Consider it a safety feature to prevent you accidentally destroying the wrong filesystem with a minor typing error. It is odd that Clonezilla is giving you this message when you are trying to restore to the original location, so are the disk names the same? For example, if you booted Clonezilla from a CD to make the backup and copied /dev/sda, but used a USB stick to boot for the restore, that stick would be /dev/sda and the disk would now be /dev/
sdb. USB drives are particularly prone to causing this problem as they can change the order in which drives are discovered.
The program you mention, cnvt-ocs-dev, is designed to change the target device for an image. Select the Shell option from the
Clonezilla menu and run it like this: $ sudo cnvt-ocs-dev -d /home/partimag IMAGENAME sda sdb
Here -d specifies the directory containing your images, the next argument is the name of the image and the last two are the source and destination devices respectively. Sudo is needed because the program must be run as root, but there is no password to enter. Once you have changed the image’s stored location, you can get back into the Clonezilla menu with
$ sudo clonezilla -d0 # that’s a zero not a letter
To avoid this problem in future, it may be possible to use the links in /dev/disk/by-uuid to designate drives instead of the device nodes, as these links will always point to the correct device even if it has a different name.