Closer Gparted-Clonezilla USB integration (support for own folder?)

Hi all,

This may be a feature request - move topic wherever is appropriate... Is also cross-posted on Clonezilla forum here https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.p … id=5452255 ..

Well, I'd like to have the possibility of having Gparted and Clonezilla run from a USB drive, and of course, I am aware of GParted-Clonezilla LiveCD: http://gpartedclonz.tuxfamily.org/ . However, the latest versions included there are from 2007 (http://download.tuxfamily.org/gpartedcl … .3.iso.txt) and they do not include the latest version of Gparted or Clonezilla.

I am not much of a programmer - however, since both Gparted and Clonezilla mantain working live media distibution, I have the feeling that just a few changes need to be done to either live project, so that they could run from the same partition on a USB key. Basically, the workflow I'd like is:

- Go download the Gparted LiveUSB
- place on USB key:
   -- a) either all contents in own folder at root of thumb drive, say X:\gparted
   -- b) or all contents as they were, renaming the 'live' folder to say 'live_gp', and syslinux/syslinux.cfg to syslinux/syslinux_gp.cfg
- Go download the Clonezilla LiveUSB
- place on USB key:
   -- a) either all contents in own folder at root of thumb drive, say X:\clonezilla
   -- b) or all contents as they were, renaming the 'live' folder to say 'live_cl',  and syslinux/syslinux.cfg to syslinux/syslinux_cl.cfg
- in a text editor, copy entries from the Clonezilla syslinux.cfg into Gparted syslinux.cfg, thereby making a new syslinux.cfg - replacing all entries to reflect the new folder organisation on the USB disk
- syslinux the drive to make it bootable

which should be eventually all that there is. Of course, this workflow is currently impossible.

What I'd like most is an addition of an "offset path" or "relative directory" switch / boot option (read through syslinux.cfg), so that each project could exist in their own folder (the "a)"'s above). So, if this switch is empty/nonexistant/equal to "/", then the project boots as regular live media; if it is set to say "folder1/folder2" then project tries to boot from X:\folder1\folder2 .
I tried messing a bit with initrd.gz and the like, but unfortunately trying to test this is beyond me.

I tried briefly to see whether the "b)"'s above are possible. For gparted, for instance, I'd do

mkdir unpack
cd unpack
sudo gzip -dc ../initrd1.img | cpio -i

and then replace in unpack/scripts/live, from LIVE_MEDIA_PATH="live" to :

LIVE_MEDIA_PATH="live_gp"

This sort of works well enough, in the sense that the project will boot - but Gparted just stands there, looking for disks forever... - so I can't use it

Doing the same in Clonezilla (setting LIVE_MEDIA_PATH="live_cl"), does not work the same at all, since the variable LIVE_MEDIA_PATH is also used to generate the name of some script files, whose names inside the image start with "live-". I tried messing some more here, but I could only get Clonezilla to boot halfways, and then it drops to shell.

All suggestions are welcome - if anyone knows how to do this properly, it will be much appreciated, even if I have to edit the initrd.gz/img's (which I'd rather leave alone) - however, an option that allows me to download the latest live-media version of these projects, rename some folders, edit some text files and syslinux and go - would possibly be the best one

Thanks for any responses..