Somewhat OT: cloning hard disks

[luke]

You should at least be able to dd the MBR:

dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr.file bs=512 count=1

Then, to write it back out:

dd if=mbr.file of=/dev/sdb

Caveat emptor

Luke


On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Alex Snow wrote:

> Hi,
> Was just given the task of cloning several machines from a master that I 
> installed.  THe master has both Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04 installed.  
> What's the best way to make an image of this drive so it can be copied 
> to several other drives? I was thinking of just using DD, but is there 
> any faster way? partimage looked interesting, but it looked like a pain 
> to clone an entire disk (doing it one partition at a time, then losing 
> the MBR from the original drive).
> Also looked at clonezilla which looked somewhat promising (it uses a 
> console interface so could have speakup integrated into it), but I was 
> unable to find any source (or even a copy of the kernel config so I 
> could recompile)
> Any advice would be greatly apreciated.
> 
>