Problems creating a clone image [SOLVED]

[mathieu]

Hi,

I've been setting up my olimex a-20 card and now wish to make a backup.
My problem is that when I flush my backup file on a new SD card (bigger than the old one) the Olimex board dosen't start anymore.
In the best case I see the system booting (I can see the tux penguins on my screen) and restarting over and over (the screen is jumping and redisplaying the same penguins over and over).
At that stage I tried accessing the terminal with ctrl+alt+f2 but it dosen't work.

I tried creating an image with the command dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=mybackup.img bs=1M && sync ( I also tried creating/restoring one image for each partition, mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2)
Using clonezilla (it gave me the return "Unknown partition table format on disk /dev/mmcblk0")
Using rsync
Using tar

None of these managed to successfully clone the MicroSD.

Now I know there must be a problem in the way the original OS is installed but it does work properly so I don't understand why I can't back it up. Anyone has an idea how I can solve this ?

The only thing I think might have gone wrong at the install is that I have been expending the root partition using fdisk as shown at the bottom of this page : http://www.home-automation-community.com/a20-olinuxino-lime-lcd-touch-screen-setup-howto/

Thanks for reading.

[LubOlimex]

Probably a typo but shouldn't the dd parameters be reversed? I mean this:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=mybackup.img
sync

should be:

dd if=mybackup.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
sync

Few suggestions:

Try without block size (BS) parameter. This would be slow but reliable.

Make sure /dev/mmcblk0 is unmounted first. Use "umount /dev/mmcblk0".

You can use our ready script to expand the file system to the maximum possible. If you are not progressing, try resizing the image with the script inside the latest image for your A20 board (in root folder). Maybe it would work better than fdisk.

Best regards,
Lub/OLIMEX

[mathieu]

Hi and thanks for your reply.

The dd command I meant was for creating the backup, I reversed it while restoring but it didn't work, even without the bs parameter (for both creating and restoring the backup). I also made sure my sd was unmounted.

I think I must have done something wrong at the install process or something.

I will start all over on a new SD formated to ext4 and see if backing up works better then.

I will mark the post a solved, thanks again.