"Not enough memory" error when trying to work with large images with partclone

[Thomas Ward]

Partclone is capable of working with images that're fragmented into tiny bits, and then reconstructing them and cloning partitions.

However, with extremely large disks, the version of partclone in Xenial has a major flaw: it wants you to have memory equal to the 'disk size'.

This means that it can't work properly with creating a raw image file from fragmented disk bits.

This is fixed in later releases, and Bionic and up have 0.3.11 which includes a large number of memory improvements which gets rid of these 'not enough memory' problems.

This supposedly is also fixed in 0.2.89 per my looking online.

Note that because of this bug, partclone in Xenial is unusable for restoring files or creating raw images from segmented images (such as that which Clonezilla takes) when trying to reconstruct the partition image. (Because of this, I am setting "Medium" as the bug importance).

Bionic and later are not affected.

[Thomas Ward (teward)]

Note that I was able to successfully backport the Bionic 0.3.11 version into Xenial with one change to the build dependencies (a very minor change) in a PPA, and this works without issues (and is not affected by this bug).

The PPA is available at https://launchpad.net/~teward/+archive/ubuntu/partclone/+packages however it does not conform to Ubuntu changelog revision standards as this was a quick-and-dirty backport rather than one intended to fit within Ubuntu repository policy neatly.

[Thomas Ward (teward)]

Correction, the backported version was using Disco as a base, however in this case the actual versions of partclone are still the same, the only difference is the version string (as the changes in Bionic, COsmic, and Disco are just no-change rebuilds as far as I can tell)

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

For reference, current versions of partclone as reported by rmadison:

 partclone | 0.2.43-1 | precise/universe | source, amd64, armel, armhf, i386, powerpc
 partclone | 0.2.51-1ubuntu3 | trusty/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el
 partclone | 0.2.86-1 | xenial/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el, s390x
 partclone | 0.3.11-1build1 | bionic/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x
 partclone | 0.3.11-1build2 | cosmic/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x
 partclone | 0.3.11-1build2 | disco/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x