Clonezilla Backups Not Recognised

Sunday, 30 March 2025

Good Day . . .

Note: I may have made a mistake and posted this in the Clonezilla Live section. It is reproduced here.

I have successfully used your software for many, many years and I have had absolutely no problems until now. I have a problem with device backups and 3.2.1-9-amd64 Clonezilla.

I occasionally check a newly minted backup for proof of being a good copy but recently this has not worked. Immediately after doing a full device backup of my main M.2 nvme ssd my computer's bios does not recognise the backup. It completely ignores the backup M.2 nvme. When the desktop OS is loaded all the contents of the backup nvme are revealed in both usb and pcie.

Using the same procedure as above, the Clonezilla stick and another OS stick display and boot normally. I tried both as usb and pcie inputs.

I do not know who wants to own this issue but I suspect that the following Clonezilla yellow text warning excerpt has something to do with it:

"Disk /dev/sdc is not MBR format or GPT disk with a special 'bios_boot' partition,
skip the reinstallation of grub-pc (MBR) program.*"

I searched for "bios_boot" and found nothing appropriate only how to activate the computer's bios function.

The main desktop M.2 nvme is GPT initially formatted with GParted and subsequently formatted by Clonezilla. The screen echos throughout the backup process give me no indication of any problems.

I tried to locate the .log file but I was not able to. I got down to /var/log on my computer while Clonezilla was installed but none of the files were openable. I got to the most likely candidate user.log but I could not open it nor could I copy it anywhere. I later searched the Clonezilla boot disk for log files using the computer's file manager and found none.

It appears to me that my computer's bios cannot find the necessary 'components' to consider the backup a bootable disk.

Any help?