Cloning a hard disk

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Cloning hard disk drives is a common maintenance task. Several options are available to perform clone options. The most simple way is to boot Ubuntu from an USB-Drive and use native UNIX commands.

Ubuntu Live

The Ubuntu side has a complete tutorial how to create an Ubuntu Live USB on Windows [1] which is based on the USB installer provided at pendrivelinux.com [2][3] and a basic iso-Ubuntu distribution [4].

Unix dd

Unix dd has the functionality to clone one hard disk to another. To see what hard disk are available use the fdisk utility on linux. 

$ sudo fidsk -l

The result will be something like:

Partition Information fdisk

In total there are 3 disk found:

  • sda
  • sdb
  • sdc



2 Small hard disks, sda and sdb.

  • The first hard disk sda has 2 partitions,
    • sda1
    • sda2

and a total size of 1.073 MB.

The second hard disk sdb has 1 partition with a total size of 136.4 GB.

The third hard disk sdc is completely unformatted,

Cloning using DD
To clone hard disk A to Hard disk C, simple do: 

   $ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc

For a large disk the command may take some time

Ubuntu fdisk -l

See also

top

Reference

top

  1. ↑ Ubuntu, Create an usb stick on Windows.
  2. ↑ pendrivelinux.com, Homewebsite
  3. ↑ pendrivelinux.com, Download universal usb-installer
  4. ↑ Ubuntu, Download Ubuntu Desktop,
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