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So here's the dilemma: I have a bunch of flash drives I'm trying to set up as multi-boot utility drives for Clonezilla and GParted, and since those utilities don't take up very much space, I'd also like to use the rest of the space on the drive as a storage partition.

The current setup I have has 4 partitions:

  1. EFI with rEFInd embedded inside
  2. Clonezilla
  3. GParted
  4. Storage

The problem I'm running into is that Windows 7 doesn't play well with multiple partitions on a flash drive, and refuses to mount any of the 3 non-EFI partitions I have. I only need to be able to mount the storage partition, but windows won't have any of it. And no, upgrading to Windows 10 isn't an option.

One way I think I may be able to get around this is to place Clonezilla and GParted on the EFI partition alongside rEFInd so that the only other partition on the drive would be the storage partition. This would get past my Windows problem, since I've eliminated the two extra linux parts.

However, I'm not sure how to do this or if it's even possible. Has anyone been able to achieve such a thing, and how would I go about doing it?

Next-Door Tech
  • 1,429

1 Answers1

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Yes, you can successfully boot Clonezilla & Gparted (with full functionality) using rEFInd boot entries. New entries are added to the "refind.conf" configuration file as shown.

    menuentry "Clonezilla" {
        icon   EFI/Clonezilla/clonezilla.png
        loader EFI/Clonezilla/vmlinuz
        initrd EFI/Clonezilla/initrd.img
        options "boot=live union=overlay username=user config components quiet noswap edd=on nomodeset enforcing=0 locales= keyboard-layouts= ocs_live_run=""ocs-live-general"" ocs_live_extra_param="""" ocs_live_batch=""no"" nomodeset ip= net.ifnames=0  nosplash live_console_font_size=16x32 live-media-path=/EFI/Clonezilla"
    }

menuentry "GParted" {
    icon   EFI/Gparted/gparted.png
    loader EFI/Gparted/vmlinuz 
    initrd EFI/Gparted/initrd.img
    options "boot=live union=overlay username=user config components quiet noswap nomodeset toram=filesystem.squashfs ip= net.ifnames=0  nosplash live_console_font_size=16x32 live-media-path=/EFI/Gparted"
}

Loader, Initrd and Options lines are pretty much cut/paste from their respective grub.cfg files on their bootable usb sticks. I also added the "live-media-path=/EFI/xxxx" to each options line. This enables the loader to find the "filesystem.squashfs" file. After that, all should be good!

Personally I also found hi-res, .PNG, transparent background icons available at hiclipart.com to be excellent icon images to use for reference on your EFI entries in refind.conf choices.

Community
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Larry Blades
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