[Novalug] Cloning a machine/drive: best practices?

William Morse wmorse@americancouncils.org
Fri Nov 1 11:38:10 EDT 2013


I've (successfully) used clonezilla to make images of disks that I later transferred to new equipment.  I have done this dozens of times at work with our fleet of older Dell computers and 80gb drives, and it is the quickest way I have found to rebuild a system.

But I was unsuccessful in cloning my laptop 1TB hard drive to an image on an external USB drive: It would overheat the laptop and cut out. Tried it three times and once put it in the unheated pantry in wintertime, which got further but still cut out. 

-Will


-----Original Message-----
From: novalug-bounces@calypso.tux.org [mailto:novalug-bounces@calypso.tux.org] On Behalf Of Crawford Rainwater
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2013 11:28 AM
To: novalug@calypso.tux.org
Subject: Re: [Novalug] Cloning a machine/drive: best practices?

(Trucated the thread a bit on my end.)

For our training classes where Linux ETC offers a LiveUSB, we have a "master" 8GB USB that we clone to the others on a quarterly basis.  Initially I did try out Clonezilla's LiveDVD/CD, but found that it errorred out on the MBR (do not recall the specifics save it was written to the logs on the LiveDVD environment and reviewed).  So we use the following with "dcfldd" (uses "dd" with a few more options, including a "progress output" which is nice!).

Notes:
- "/dev/sdb" is the original device to be cloned.
- "/dev/sdc" is the target device.

sudo dcfldd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc
sudo dcfldd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1

The second "dcfldd" is for the MBR and should be "quick" relatively speaking.  The initial "dcfldd" will take some time and YMMV of course due to the original device's size.

There is another variant of "dd" like "dcfldd" that is similar as well in features (not thinking of "dd_rescue" which someone else mentioned) which has similar.  I forgot why we went with this over the other one, but I believe both were quite similar in nature and options.

HTH.

--- Crawford

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