Can’t boot Clonezilla on Surface Go 1
Can’t boot Clonezilla on Surface Go 1
Hi everyone,
I have a Surface Go 1 with 128 gb hooked up to a usb-c screen.
I’ve installed Fedora 38 on it and I’m really happy with the whole setup. So much so that I wanted to be able to reproduce it on all my computers.
The problem is I can’t get the machine to boot from a Usb-a with usb-c adaptor or from a usb-c stick.
I’ve tried everything. I can access the uefi settings and disable secure boot and change the boot order. At first I thought it was because I was using an usb-c adapter but buying a usc-c stick didn’t change a thing.
In the past the only way I was able to boot from usb was to break my system, install windows again and go to windows recovery. I don’t want to do that again as I would want to clone my system.
For now, I’ve resorted to cloning my girlfriend’s 2012 MacBook Pro with Fedora on it, but since it’s not my daily driver, it’s not where I’m creating my perfect setup.
If anyone can help me, I’d be really grateful.
There are a bunch of options most are kind of complicated. As mentioned here before ventoy will get clonezilla running from a network boot. Without clonezilla, a few things I can think of are:
#1 just clone the system while it's running. Get a large external drive and sudo dd if=/dev/your_internal_disk of=/path/to/disk/image.img
If you want you can boot into single user mode to do this, it's will be less risky and you may be able to mount root read only. Note that this carries no risk for the source machine if dd is used correctly, only that the filesystem of a target machine may have to be repaired after the clone.
If you'd rather just clone partitions that would work this way as well.
The target machine would need a live bootable is to copy the disk image onto the target disk. Dd is a inefficient option but it's on almost every system. Use partclone instead of you can, same as clonezilla uses.
#2 expose your disks with network block devices. You'll need kernel support I think, but then it's basically the same as #1 but you can do the clone from a remote machine
#3 build empty filesystems on the other machines just copy all of the files. You can use nfs or samba but it would probably be better to tar everything to preserve file ownership and permissions using these protocols. Rsync would probably be best. after copying the files a bootloader would need to be installed and configured.
My Surface GO also refuses to boot Linux usb sticks directly (interestingly windows usb sticks are no problem).
What worked for me is creating a ventoy usb stick and then putting the iso on there.
If this does not work you can try to set the boot order from fedora with
efibootmgr. More infosThanks I guess I’ll try that👍
Well so just to give an update, while using Ventoy, everything works. It doesn't matter if you're using a Usb-A stick with an adapter or a Usb-C.
It's crazy to think that I've looked at so many tutorials and that the solution was so simple.
The surface Go is a lovely little Linux machine, but some stupid things are difficult on it.
have you tried ventoy?
You may not have to do a disk clone to replicate your setup. Have you used Git before?
Configuration for most packages is stored under your home folder in a directory called “.config” (the . at the front makes the folder hidden). Taking this folder and putting it on your other systems should replicate most of your setup. (Some other packages, like bash or zsh, will place configuration information directly under your home folder. Make sure you transfer those files and folders too)
That sounds a bit too complicated for me but I might do that if the ventoy trick doesn’t work. Thanks
If you haven't already tried a USB 2.0 flash drive, give that a go. I find they are less finicky to boot from than some 3.0 drives.
I’ve tried but only through an adapter as the surface go is usb-c only. It didn’t work..