Skip to main content

Cloning nearly full 256gb Micro SD card to another 256gb Micro SD Card to share my Retropie Setup

Thread needs solution

I have been having trouble cloning my SD card to another same size SD card (256gb).  Once the process is complete and I put the new card in my Raspberry PI 3B+, it gives me 4 raspberries at the top of the screen, then stops just before it would start showing the boot up command lines. 

Any suggestions?  Am I not going to be able to go same size card to same size card in the end?  I understand that the cards may actually be a different size once you drill down to the actual amount of bytes on each one.  I bought Acronis 2020 hoping it could solve this issue, but I may have jumped the gun and should have just bought a 400gb SD card to make a clone.  I'm using Samsung and Sandisk SD cards, not cheap ones...any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I'm a nubbie, so go easy on me!

0 Users found this helpful

Jesse, welcome to these public User Forums.

What format are your SD cards using for your Raspberry PI?  NTFS, exFAT, FAT32 etc?

What computer are you using with ATI 2020 and how does this boot into the Windows OS?

My reason for asking, is that the Clone tool follows the partition format of the Windows OS system, so if your OS boots in UEFI / GPT mode, then cloning will want to convert any target media to use that same partition mode!

I do not recall seeing any other posts in the forums about cloning SD media for Raspberry PI systems, so cannot point you to how other users have achieved this aim?

The source card has a small partition that is FAT16 and a large partition that is EXT4.  I'm using a laptop with windows 10, I'm reading the source card from a sd card reader plugged into a usb port, the destination is in the laptop's sd slot (internal).  The destination sd card is formatted to FAT32.  I have no reason for this, it's just what I read to do for a Raspberry Pi.  Learning as i go...hopefully.

I don't know what you mean when you said 'how does this boot into the Windows OS.'

Do you want me to try to boot the laptop itself from the sd card, instead of the internal HDD?

Or boot the laptop up in Linux (from a bootable media, dvd in my case), then try to clone it again?  My understanding is that Raspberry's OS is Raspbian made by Linux.

 

Jesse, have you compared the source and target SD card format and partition scheme after doing a clone here?

Open Windows Disk Management then select the SD cards one at a time, and right-click on the card name to show the Properties, then check the partition scheme.

Example below from a 512MB SD card formatted FAT using MBR partition scheme. (Only card I could find laying around...!).

Jesse,

As a potential work-a-round / test, I would try taking a full backup of the SD card, using the option to backup sector-by-sector since ext4 is in play (just to be safe - even though it will be slower, but really shouldn't be too much more if the card is nearly full anyway) and then restoring the backup to the new SD card.  This might overcome any additional limitations of cloning (which has a few more restrictions in regards to what it can and cannot do - generally speaking).  Hopefully that does the trick.

If not, I've read a couple different forums and web pages that recommend making .img files of SD cards (specifically for Raspberry Pi which might be another potential solution.  

https://www.howtogeek.com/341944/how-to-clone-your-raspberry-pi-sd-card-for-foolproof-backup/

 

 

Jesse,

I can recommend that you follow the Link that Bobbo posted and use the Win32 Disk Imager app discussed in the article.  Given your SD card main partition format is EXT4 your installation is definitely Linux and the Win32 Disk Imager app is the slickest of all apps at handling cloning of such installs.

I can confirm, that Win32 Disk Imager works fine for this purpose. The disadvantage of Win32DiskImager is however, that the SD-Card image is as large as the SD-card, i.e. a 32 GByte SD-card results in an image of 32 GB. Another disadvantage is that it takes fairly long time for making images and writing them back.

Acronis TI2015 was able to backup SD-cards, resulting in backup sizes of approx. 3 GB and was very fast in reading. However writing back the image to the SD-card did not give a bootable Raspberry Pi card.

Acronis TI2020 is even worse - starting a backup of an SD-Card does not even finish.

I do remember, that some years ago backup and recovery of SD-Cards worked with ATI2015 and this was fast and convenient. I have an image of an SD-card created in year 2016, which I could recover just recently using ATI2015. But nowadays recovering backups of Raspian Buster does not work with ATI2015 and with ATI2020 it is not even possible to create backups.

 

 

 

All,

Might I suggest the possible solution to this could be to use the Linux based Recovery Media to both create the backup and perform the recovery of that backup.

We are dealing with a Linux variant here and it makes sense to me that to have success a Linux based OS would have an advantage in dealing with the EXT4 file system in use on these devices.

You can create the Linux based media by clicking the Advanced option in the Acronis Media Builder tool or, you can download a copy of the media from your Acronis account online then burn that to a flash drive and boot your PC with it.

Another option if considering booting to perform the SD card clone / restore is to download a copy of the Clonezilla Live .ISO and burn to either CD or write to a USB disk to boot from.

Clonezilla fully supports all the following file systems:

  • Many File systems are supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs and nilfs2 of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, (5) minix of Minix, and (6) VMFS3 and VMFS5 of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Minix, VMWare ESX and Chrome OS/Chromium OS, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored by Partclone. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
  • LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
Enchantech wrote:

All,

Might I suggest the possible solution to this could be to use the Linux based Recovery Media to both create the backup and perform the recovery of that backup.

I already testet AcronisTI2020 Linux based Recovery USB-Stick - it does not work.

 

Berti,

If you care to, how about explaining "it does not work"?  How so does it not work?  Which part fails, the backup, the recovery, the boot of the disk after recovery?

The more information you provide, the better replies you will get.

I might be wrong, but I seem to remember some other threads where it was determined that SD cards could be backed up and restored, but would not be bootable as well.

Berti,

Did you try a sector-by-sector backup to see if it would be successful, or not?

If so, in either case, it would likely be as slow and as big as Win32 Disk Imager.  However, it might allow things to progress and finish (and hopefully boot).  A working backup / recovery is better than none at all, but understand what you're hoping to accomplish here.

There are some other free backup programs as well, that you may want to try for comparison to see if any have better results in this particular situation. I don't have much experience with bootable SD cards so can't really test for myself.

One issue that I'm wondering about is whether or not it makes a difference how you start the restore (or if you're cloning) which is causing a boot issue.  We've learned in the forums that True Image will take the booted OS boot type (GPT or Legacy) and use the same for the clone... which has caused issues when someone has taken a Legacy Windows OS hard drive, attached it to a booted UEFI Windows OS with True Image and cloned it... which clones the disk, but as GPT instead of Legacy.  Likewise, when booting rescue media, people have booted in legacy mode when restoring a GPT image which results in an unbootable system and sometimes vice-versa as well.

I wonder if something similar is happening here.  

 

Enchantech wrote:

Berti,

If you care to, how about explaining "it does not work"?  How so does it not work?  Which part fails, the backup, the recovery, the boot of the disk after recovery?

"it does not work" means, I can setup a backup (running Acronis2020 in Win10) for my SD-Card and start it with "Backup now", it seems to work, but it does not come to an end.  Win32Diskimager takes about 7 minutes for the complete backup, but with Acronis 2020 even after 10 minutes it said "gathering information" (or similar).

Perhaps someone who owns a Raspberry Pi too could test that and give some hints.

 

Berti wrote:
Enchantech wrote:

Berti,

If you care to, how about explaining "it does not work"?  How so does it not work?  Which part fails, the backup, the recovery, the boot of the disk after recovery?

"it does not work" means, I can setup a backup (running Acronis2020 in Win10) for my SD-Card and start it with "Backup now", it seems to work, but it does not come to an end.  Win32Diskimager takes about 7 minutes for the complete backup, but with Acronis 2020 even after 10 minutes it said "gathering information" (or similar).

Perhaps someone who owns a Raspberry Pi too could test that and give some hints.

 

Sorry to revive this old thread, but I ran into an issue as well, and figured I would try it. I did it with a 64GB Sandisk A2 microSD card containing an image for a Raspberry Pi 64-bit OS, in a Sandisk microSD reader.

Win32diskimager backs up the card to a 64GB file in 6 minutes 51 seconds - about 155MB/s, and restored it in 15 min 3 seconds - about 71 MB/s. The Pi4 booted fine from the SD card after the restore.

ATI 2021 in sector-by-sector mode backed it up in 6 minutes and 12 seconds - about 172MB/s. And restored it in 12 minutes 46 seconds - about 83MB/s. Unfortunately, the Pi4 was unable to boot from SD card after the restore.

 

Julien, Others,

A Raspberry Pi uses whats called an FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) filesystem.  This is a hybrid of sorts consisting of an FAT boot partition and a Linux format (probably EXT4) main partition.  Having said that there are a number of other filesystem types found on a Pi SD card.  These are not supported officially by Acronis.

I it were me trying to do this the best way is using the right tool.  Win32Diskimager is obviously capable of doing that. If I waned to experiment with using Acronis I would try the Clone tool as that would attempt to copy all data on the SD to another SD.  

Hallo Julien Pierre,

Bei mir funktioniert ein SD Kartenbackup und die Wiederherstellung nur, wenn von einem Linux basiertem Bootmedium mit Acronisplugin im "Bios" Mode gestartet wird und beim Wiederherstellen "Recover Disk-Signatur" angehakt ist.

----------------------------------

For me, an SD card backup and recovery only works if the Linux-based bootmedia with Acronisplugin is started in "Bios" mode and "Recover Disk Signature" is checked when restoring.

Attachment Size
595438-303337.pdf 595.02 KB
Enchantech wrote:

Julien, Others,

A Raspberry Pi uses whats called an FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) filesystem.  This is a hybrid of sorts consisting of an FAT boot partition and a Linux format (probably EXT4) main partition.  Having said that there are a number of other filesystem types found on a Pi SD card.  These are not supported officially by Acronis.

I it were me trying to do this the best way is using the right tool.  Win32Diskimager is obviously capable of doing that. If I waned to experiment with using Acronis I would try the Clone tool as that would attempt to copy all data on the SD to another SD.  

Win32diskimager works fine, except it's not capable of restoring the image to a smaller SD card. I have a number of cards labeled as "64GB" that aren't exactly the same size, and this can be a problem.

Win32diskimager also reads/writes the entire card, including unused space, which takes extra time, and wears out the flash on the SD card much faster. I just had a 32GB microSD UHS-II Lexar card give out. Not sure if that was the reason. But the same card is no longer available as a replacement. I purchased a Sandisk 170MB/s instead.

I know ATI doesn't officially support EXT4. I have seen it work when backing up my NAS Ubuntu OS from SSD, and restoring to another SSD of different size, though. SD card for the Pi seems to be a different story, unfortunately.

 

G. Uphoff wrote:

Hallo Julien Pierre,

Bei mir funktioniert ein SD Kartenbackup und die Wiederherstellung nur, wenn von einem Linux basiertem Bootmedium mit Acronisplugin im "Bios" Mode gestartet wird und beim Wiederherstellen "Recover Disk-Signatur" angehakt ist.

----------------------------------

For me, an SD card backup and recovery only works if the Linux-based bootmedia with Acronisplugin is started in "Bios" mode and "Recover Disk Signature" is checked when restoring.

Danke !

I will give that a try. Which version of ATI Linux boot media did you use that succeeded ?

 

G. Uphoff wrote:

I think it was a Linux-based ATI 2019 boot media.

Thanks. I tried it with ATI 2019 Linux media. Unfortunately, it did not work for me. The card I restored to won't boot in my Raspberry Pi4.

It looks like Win32diskimager is the only working option to do a backup/restore from Windows.

 

Hallo Julien Pierre,

Bei mir funktioniert ein SD Kartenbackup und die Wiederherstellung auch mit einem mit Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office erstelltem Linux-basiertem Bootmedium, wenn von dem Linux basiertem Bootmedium mit Acronisplugin im "Bios" Mode gestartet wird und beim Wiederherstellen "Recover Disk-Signatur" angehakt ist.

Zuerst wird vom Bootmedium gestartet und dann erst die SD Karte angeschlossen. Die SD Karte wird niemals unter Windows angeschlossen.

-----------------------------------

For me, an SD card backup and restoration also works with a Linux-based boot medium created with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office if the Linux-based boot medium is started in "Bios" mode with Acronisplugin and "Recover Disk Signature" is checked when restoring .

First the boot medium is started and only then is the SD card connected. The SD card is never connected under Windows.

Attachment Size
595627-303621.pdf 2.01 MB
595627-303623.pdf 1.11 MB
595627-303626.pdf 1.81 MB
595627-303628.GIF 90.16 KB