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I'm unable to mount an external Thunderbolt drive on my Macbook Pro (Retina) from the Clonezilla shell. lshw doesn't show the device. The drive also has a USB 3 connector, which works correctly.

Is there some trick to getting a Thunderbolt drive to work in this scenario? Other Thunderbolt devices (another MBPr in target disk mode) also aren't recognized.

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The 3.17 kernel version of Linux supports Thunderbolt. I have a MacPro running Ubuntu 14.04 connecting to a Thunderbolt RAID array (an OWC Thunderbay).

Currently Ubuntu uses older kernels (14.10 is on 3.16), and if this is the case with your distro, you'll need to upgrade.

For Ubuntu, these instructions worked great:

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2014/10/install-upgrade-kernel-3-17-ubuntu/

Other distros are probably similar.

Also, since we are here, this article had a great description of setting up a RAID array.

http://zackreed.me/articles/38-software-raid-5-in-debian-with-mdadm

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Unfortunately, there's not yet a linux driver for Thunderbolt. It was discussed in late 2011 at the Linux Plumbers Conference, but as of yet, nothing much had happened in that field.

So you might have to stick with USB for a while.

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  • Thanks. It would have been nice to boot MBP #2 into target disk mode and use Clonezilla to clone the drive directly to the new machine. At least the external drive has a USB connection. I'd happily pay for a utility that would do this; it would have saved me several hours.
    – 3Dave
    Feb 28, 2013 at 23:16
  • Checking in 3+ years later Is this still true? Is a thunderbolt driver being worked on? Thanks!
    – SteveLambert
    Sep 19, 2016 at 23:19

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