What about using the DD command via linux? Are there any known issues with that?
e.g. http://www.desinc.net/clon
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Clone linux hard drive + all partitions
I have a 40gb IDE hard drive, formatted into five partitions. The software on the hard drive is a heavily modified, proprietary version of debian linux that is used as the operating system for a commercial arcade game.
It's contents is very valuable, and we only have one copy. So I am looking for a 100% surefire way of making a perfect clone of this hard drive to another IDE hard drive that wll be larger than the source hard drive (probably 80gb or 120gb). Everything needs to be cloned, right down to the partitions, boot record, and all contents. I am looking for a method of doing this that guarantees that the original hard drive will not be touched. I just don't want to damage the hard drive in the process of trying to back it up.
I have a tower PC, a laptop, (both with WinXP Pro), and a variety of IDE->USB cables and enclosures. So... what's the appropriate way to do this?
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Answers
I clone drives with Linux all the time.
Usually I just copy from one device to another, example cp /dev/hda to /dev/hdb. This keeps all the partitions intact. Only requirement is that hdb is same size or greater than hda. And you should umount all partitions on hda before cloning them.
Using cp requires that there be no unreadable sectors on both drives. Otherwise dd is a better fit, since it's designed to work around that. I just happen to be used to cp since I rarely run into bad sectors, but I suppose I will sooner or later.
In either case, initially the second drive is going to "act" like it was the same size as the first drive, except you will now have additional space with which to create new partitions.
And a caveat, which I hope is obvious: You will want to make absolutely certain that you know which drive is which when you do the clone. You definitely do not want to overwrite the drive containing your precious data, by accidentally cloning the blank drive onto it!!!
Also if your using Ubuntu here is a great resource on how to backup:
http://ubuntuforums.org/sh
http://linuxmint.com/forum
Yes, the DD command should allow you to create an exact clone of the drive. You would use something like:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=61440
After dd was complete, all the files, partitions, timestamps, attributes, etc. would be exactly the same between the 2 drives. The only difference between the 2 drives would be that the 2nd drive would have a bunch of unallocated space (the difference in the drive sizes).
If you wanted to fix that, you could make the new drive look exactly the same size as the source drive by using SETMAX or some other utility to set the HPA of the new drive to the difference of LBA between the 2 drives. Note that setting the HPA is most likely unnecessary, but I included it to be thorough.
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by: WallDPosted on 2008-07-14 at 09:19:27ID: 21999489
Acronis has a version for linux never used it though.
Have used Ghost of a ms dos boot disk to copy a linux drive and that worked fine a little experimentation should enable allow you to alter the volume sizes.