Simple Hard Disc Clone Technique

[SimpleSi]

If all else fails...

 

Cutting a long story short I needed to clone a hard drive and my Ghost floppies wouldn't work (drives? media? who knows?)

 

So I put the drive in another working identical computer - booted into Linux (used Puppy Linux 1.0.7 but any LiveCD would do) and ran a console window.

 

entered

 

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

 

and off it went copying drive 1 to drive 2.

 

I don't know how long it took (I went home after an hour) but when I came back today - it was done and the drive worked fine.

 

regards

 

Simon

PS I believe that if you specifiy some block size parameter in the dd command it would run faster but YMMV!

[indie]

Almost exactly what I use, if i'm doing it with PATA drives I make sure the source drive is on the Primary Master (hda) and the destination is on the Secondary Master (hdc) which speeds things up and I also make the block size 128MB.

 

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=128M

 

But make sure the machine you're using has plenty of RAM when you get to bigger block sizes.

[MkII]

Used one of the free cloning tools on the UBCD: PC Inspector Clone Maxx last week when Ghost refused to play. took about an hour next to Ghosts ~20mins but did the job nonetheless.

[CyberNerd]

Also check ghost for unix g4u - and ghost 4 linux (apparenly a blatant rip-off of g4u) these can do the same over a network to an ftp site

Its also possible to pipe the output from dd into a file or over an ssh connection to a fileserver using any linux distro.

 

dd is byte-for-byte so if you output to a file is does copy all the zero's ! Its well worth using compression if the machine is fast enough.

 

nice tutorial here:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/saw27/notes/backup-hard-disk-partitions.html

[mac_shinobi]

Take a look here :

 

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

 

and also here :

 

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

 

Those are my 2 favs for hdd imaging

[ninjabeaver]

Cool, thanks for those.

[mac_shinobi]

who you talking to ninja beaver lol ?

[pwds]

Slightly late in the game but check out Clonezilla live. Allows direct disc-to-disc backup as well as via network shares and keeps up well with hardware and network drivers. Boot CD so doesn't need any network setup.

 

If you're wanting to have a more permanent imaging solution then Clonezilla can be set up for PXE boot and then you don't need to worry about CD or network drivers.