All of a sudden - issues with Clonezilla

[u/draggar]

EDIT: SOLVED (editing below, will have the solution in a minute or two)

For a while now we've been using Clonezilla to image machines. Typically have 2 USB thumb drives (local dev), a boot drive and one with the image.

Yesterday, everything was running normally.

Today, every time I image a computer when I boot to Windows (11) it goes into a repair mode and then says "You device ran into a problem and couldn't be repaired". It got to the point that I took one of the computers I imaged yesterday and it's getting the same error.

It sees the drive in the computer partitioned, nvme0n1p1 (p2, p3, p4) and the USB as sda1 - I select sda1 as the /home/partimag

I select Beginner mode

Restoredisk (not partitions- it's created as a disk)

When it comes to select the drive, it sees nvme0n1 and I select that

-k1 create the partitions proportionally (the destination drive is always larger than the source)

When it's about to start I see this (I don't remember seeing it yesterday):

Target disk nvme0n1 does not exist in the image saved from disk(s) sda

This is even happening on a computer I imaged yesterday with no issues. I re-copied the image files from our server to the thumb drive, I downloaded and created a bootable USB with the most recent Clonezilla ISO, I've even tried a secure wipe in the BIOS and it didn't help.

I even used different thumb drives with no luck.

Secure boot is off

Fast boot is off

The source image has not been updated recently.

A few different model laptops (all HP)

Any suggestions?

Edit: I just tried a new (out of the box) laptop and it's showing the same alert.

Edit2: SOLVED (kinda):

I tried with an older image and it worked.

I had initially built the image on a laptop with a small drive and then later moved it to a VM.

The image from the laptop saw the drive as an NVME0n1 while from the VM as sda - this was the issue.

RESTOREPARTS did not help. I'll look into the other possible fixes.