Need multiple exact bootable duplicates of a 320 GB Vista/Fedora notebook drive!

[jspaceman]

I used the commands below without the gui to duplicate my dual boot vista/fedora laptop drive. After copying the drive to a equal capacity drive, I was not able to boot the vista partition at all. Replacing the old HD with the copied one worked fine. Would somebody mind breaking down this command by command for me, to see what happened? my partitions are:

1. Toshiba System for laptop
2. Vista NTFS
3. Boot
4. /
5. home
6. swap


dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=2M &

My goal was to make an exact copy of the original disc, to store in my safe.
I am trying to see if any flags or something in this command changed grub or
my configuration, the vista partitions were copied, it said it was missing winloader.exe, and grub.conf had not been changed. Also, not sure what the bs=2M & means. Any ideas appreciated, thanks.....

[jspaceman]

also used this command, was told to use to check the progress during the hard drive copy.

kill -USR1 $(pidof dd)

Wasn't sure about the kill part of it.

[zmdmw52]

You may want to try Clonezilla-Live CD (Disk clone option)

http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://www.clonezilla.org/download/s...-zip-files.php

[JEO]

Maybe Vista is checking the drive serial number in an identify command and refusing to boot from the wrong drive (copy protection).

[jspaceman]

Really? Clonezilla was exactly what I was looking for, I've been asking if there was an open source equivalent to Ghost for years, and nobody ever mentioned Clonezilla. Plus, it comes in a Live CD, or on the web as a download-able ISO? Happy day.

It worked great, and I just re-installed grub onto my /dev/sda and everything was exactly back to normal, including my grub configuration, even my custom
grub bootscreen! Thanks again, now I'm going to clone a disk to image copy on my 1 TB drive, and just sit back and relax.

[zmdmw52]

Originally Posted by jspaceman

Really? Clonezilla was exactly what I was looking for, I've been asking if there was an open source equivalent to Ghost for years, and nobody ever mentioned Clonezilla. Plus, it comes in a Live CD, or on the web as a download-able ISO? Happy day.

It worked great, and I just re-installed grub onto my /dev/sda and everything was exactly back to normal, including my grub configuration, even my custom
grub bootscreen! Thanks again, now I'm going to clone a disk to image copy on my 1 TB drive, and just sit back and relax.:cool:

You can get a lot of information of disk imaging/cloning/partitioning programs from the Radified website. They also have an accompanying forum, with different sections for different imaging software.
There is some info on Clonezilla here: http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/Ya...num=1239229184

Glad to know Clonezilla worked for you; I have been using Clonezilla Live CD to backup Windows & Linux partitions for the past few months (earlier, was mainly using Norton Ghost 2003).

[Gödel]

The dd command shouldn't have touched the original vista drive, unless you did something else. I wonder if vista didn't like booting with two identical drives present. Also, there would be conflicts between any UUIDs used for partitions, so after doing the copy you should unplug the copied drive, you don't make it clear if that was what you tried.

Clonezilla uses dd for partitons if it can't recognise the filesystem, but it's fairly mature now and has support for lvm2 even. Main reason people don't use dd is that it clones all the space, even unused space, whereas clonezilla backups only the used sectors. You can get the same sort of (final) result by zeroing out the freespace first, then dd ... | gzip > backup (or any other compression util).

I often use dd for backups because it's always been reliable and widely available. But free tools like clonezilla are certainly a better option than rip-off commercial cloning apps from norton et al.