Cloning a hard disk

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 which is based on the USB installer provided at pendrivelinux.com and a basic iso-Ubuntu distribution .

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