Hello,
I installed Leap to a 16GB USB stick. This has turned out to be too small. I tried to use Clonezilla 2.4.2-61-amd64.iso to clone from the 16GB stick to the 32GB stick. This fails when trying to copy the btrfs partition. I am using advanced mode and the only switch I have selected is to expand the partition table to fit the larger size of the destination stick.
Am I doing something wrong or should I be using different cloning software?
Thanks, Grace
Do you see an error which you can post?
AFAIK Clonezilla bit copies images, so the file system and files should not be read.
Also, keep in mind that you can’t clone to a smaller target, so if you have your parameters backward, the operation will fail.
You can also try cloning without increasing the partition size.
If you can do a direct copy, then you can expand the partitions later using gparted
Gparted in general, including installing and running on openSUSE
http://gparted.org
If you’d prefer to work with a LiveCD, this can modify even system and root partitions. Should be unneeded in your scenario unless you are running openSUSE directly from your USB stick and have no other option
**gparted.org/**livecd.php
****TSU
I updated clonezilla to 2.4.5-23-amd64.iso and the cloning process actually completed; but there seemed to be a problem installing grub2. Here are the last few lines of the cloneing process. They completed without error; but I’ve done this dozens of times and it took way… longer than it should have:
Test if we can chroot the restored OS partition /dev/sdb3 (this is the btrfs partition).
No, we are not able to chroot the restored OS partition /dev/sdb3.
Trying to use grub2 from the running OS...
Checking grub-install version...
Running: grub-install --force --recheck --root-directory=/tmp/hd_img.orfKh9 /dev/sdb3
Installing for i386 pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported done.
During previous attempts the chroot actually succeeded; but the result was basically the same. There was a problem with grub.
The symptoms were either, the message “GRUB _” would appear and just hang there indefinitely or a quick BIOS message would appear stating “No operating system;” and then my normal OS would load from HDD.
I really need to be able to do this on a regular basis. I use OS on USB stick a lot; and expect to be able to clone to a larger stick when I run out of space. At this point I’m dead-in-the-water and cannot continue until I have found a solution or work-around.
Any help appreciated.
Expanding the partitions will not work. They are listed in the following order:
FAT32
SWAP
BTRFS
It is possible to shrink the FAT32 partition; but gparted crashes when you try it. The only way I’ve been able to do this is to delete the FAT32 partition, then reformat it to a smaller size. Moving either SWAP or BTRFS into the available space will completely hose the OS. I will not try this again.
This means GRUB boot sector is loaded, reads second stage from disk and gets garbage which it then attempts to execute. As we do not even know where boot sector is loaded from, it is impossible to guess what happens. You may consider running GitHub - arvidjaar/bootinfoscript with your USB stick inserted this may give more insight on how bootloader was installed there.
or a quick BIOS message would appear stating “No operating system;” and then my normal OS would load from HDD.
This likely means you have either no MBR code at all or generic MBR without active partition.
I really need to be able to do this on a regular basis.
I never used any tool to clone Linux because I never know what they do, so I hope someone else can help with clonezilla.