[Bernard]

I use hdclone to make an image of a SuSe 11.3 on a 500 GB harddisk. Then I copy that image to a second harddisk of same type. I can't boot from that disk. The boot loader 'grub' appears and nothing more happens. What did I wrong.

[Alex]

Depending on the installation, it might be that the installation uses different the discs names for identifying partitions.

Does the GRUB appear as a program, or does only 'loading grub' appear on screen?

Once you have the GRUB running as a program, you should be able to select the installations, in your case SuSE 11.3 and SuSE 11.3 failsave. Select the first, press 'e' to edit the command line. It will read something along the lines of

kernel /boot/desktop-2.6.32.1-0.5 root=/dev/disk/SAMSUNG-00WA01-0124

or

kernel /boot/desktop-2.6.32.1-0.5 root=/dev/disk/uuid/{41303234-12...

or

kernel /boot/desktop-2.6.32.1-0.5 root=/dev/sda1


The last but one cases should work without problem, as partition identifiers remain the same. In the last case it's depending on which connector the boot disc is connected to. If you have two or more discs running, try swapping the cables (or try different values for /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1...)

If the first method is the case (the one with the Disc name), you should revert back to the 3rd method.

You'll have to look for the file system. Press 'Esc' to go to the menu selection, and press 'c' to have a command line. Now enter

ls (hd0,0)

This will show you the contents of /dev/sda1 (if you're running Grub 1.96 instead of Grub 0.9, you'll have to start at (hd0,1).

if you see the following files:

bin boot dev etc home proc srv sys var tmp (among a few others) you have the root directory.

If you don't see these, try the next partition: (hd0,1), then (hd0,2),... then the next disk: (hd1,0), (hd1,1), etc.

hd0 -> /dev/sda
hd1 -> /dev/sdb
hd2 -> /dev/sdc

and the number behind the comma is the partition number, as mentioned above, in the older Grub 0.9 you'll have to add 1 to it, so (hd0,0) is /dev/sda1, (hd3,4) is /dev/sdd5. With the newer Grub 1.96, you would have (hd0,1) for /dev/sda1, (hd3,4) for /dev/sdd4.

Once you know the root file system's location, press 'Esc' to exit the Grub command line, select the normal start entry, and press 'e' to edit it. Replace the root=/dev/discs/ with root=/dev/sda1 (or whatever you found to be your root directory). Then press Ctrl+X to boot.

Usually, the file /etc/fstab will contain the mount points for the other partitions, that might also be connected in the wrong way.

Once you're booted (but cannot mount other file systems), you'll be presented with the emergency shell. Open it, and use your favorite editor to change the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst (or /boot/grub/grub.cfg in the new Grub 1.96 case) to the value you just found, and then edit the file /etc/fstab. Here it's basically the same. Replace the device locations for the mount points by the correct ones (You'll see the root FS also mentioned here, so you know which partition resides on the same disk, only with a different partition number). Once you changed that, you're ready to go.

To avoid such things, it's probably better to set up the original system in such a way that either UUIDs are used for partition recognization or use the old-style (/dev/sda...) device nodes. Using disc specific nodes is what I would consider a bad idea (no idea why the SuSE guys decided to go that route).

[Bernard]

I think the problem does not depend on different disc names. The file menue.lst was already edited to use /dev/sda2. In detail the entries are:

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Mon Nov 8 14:28:10 CET 2010
# THIS FILE WILL BE PARTIALLY OVERWRITTEN by perl-Bootloader
# Configure custom boot parameters for updated kernels in /etc/sysconfig/bootloader

default 0
timeout 8
##YaST - generic_mbr
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/boot/message
##YaST - activate

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title Desktop -- openSUSE 11.3 - 2.6.34-12
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.34-12-desktop root=/dev/sda2 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent quiet showopts vga=0x31a
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.34-12-desktop

I had have also edit fstab as follow:

/dev/sda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 / ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0

I've also checked device.map, there are no device enteries with serial numbers


When I use a direct copy from harddisk to harddisk if work.

HD1 -> HD2 is OK
HD1 -> image -> HD2 does not work

From my point of view it looks like a problem specific to copy from and to an image.

[Alex]

Do you do any resizing with the imaging or not? in the latter case, some e2resize is called to do the resizing. Though I highly doubt it will make things worse. I'm not yet sure what would be the difference between imaging and cloning, we'll have to do some more inquiries ourselves.

[Bernard]

I start Hdclone from CD and I don't change any defautl settings.

[Bernard]

moin,
I do still have the problem. I've update HDclone to version 4, but I got the same problem. I've tried with option CHS without any effect. What can I do?

[Alex]

In another case, not doing the adjustments at all made a working copy. Please try doing a clone, but don't do Manual or Automatic Adjustment after cloning.

[hydroref]

Installed HDClone 4.0 Free on USB flash and booted to it. Source list only shows the flash drive and no hard disks. Any help?

[Alex]

Hard Disks are listed if they are supported by the native version. This is the case with IDE disks and Serial-ATA disks, if they run in compatible or AHCI mode. If they run in some sort of controller-specific mode or in RAID mode, HDClone won't detect them, as the protocol to talk to them is not specified.

Try setting the SATA mode in the computer's BIOS to either 'Compatible' or 'IDE', usually this is found in the advanced chipset options (or something similar).