Best way to clone a server hdd?

[Fred Bloggs]

Some HDD manufacturers have a free version of Acronis that you can use if there is at least one of their HDD's installed in the machine. I have used the Acronis software from Western Digital and from Seagate, I can confirm that they worked faultlessly for me when migrating HDD's.

[administrator]

If you have only the one partition then it is easy. Just back up all the content in a tar file.

Howto: Backup and restore your system! - Ubuntu Forums

Did this recently with a machine containing about 100GB and it worked well.

Why not partition the disk to mirror your working one and then just tar, (or cp as someone else suggested) the content over. Or RSync.

[Sysman]

If you have only the one partition then it is easy. Just back up all the content in a tar file.

Howto: Backup and restore your system! - Ubuntu Forums

Did this recently with a machine containing about 100GB and it worked well.

Why not partition the disk to mirror your working one and then just tar, (or cp as someone else suggested) the content over. Or RSync.

I usually leave out the "v" from the tar command options, especially when going at a whole disk.

• any errors reported are easy to see
• if working remotely, you aren't consuming a load of bandwidth for the display of each and every file. Displaying everything over a network connection can slow the whole process down

[administrator]

I usually leave out the "v" from the tar command options, especially when going at a whole disk.

• any errors reported are easy to see
• if working remotely, you aren't consuming a load of bandwidth for the display of each and every file. Displaying everything over a network connection can slow the whole process down

Good tip, thanks!

[Sysman]

FREE download disk copy, disk clone, partition copy freeware

Tried that (it's EASEUS) and when it saw that I was running 64 bit Windows it wanted me to cough up for the paid for version.

Some HDD manufacturers have a free version of Acronis that you can use if there is at least one of their HDD's installed in the machine. I have used the Acronis software from Western Digital and from Seagate, I can confirm that they worked faultlessly for me when migrating HDD's.

I can confirm that. I just did a search for "Western Digital Acronis", and found the relevant version for my disk. There's also a WD "Data Lifeguard" utility which does low level reporting and testing.

[Fred Bloggs]

Excellent, I hope the WD flavour of Acronis worked for you. It was 100% for me a few weeks back.

[lilelvis2000]

have a look at this. I think it does answer your questions.
Clone your Ubuntu installation onto a new hard disk | Linux.com

[Cliphead]

I cloned two drives today, WinXP and a CentOS 5 server using Clonezilla.

Worked perfectly.

[Sysman]

I cloned two drives today, WinXP and a CentOS 5 server using Clonezilla.

Worked perfectly.

Good find. Thanks.

(the more tools the better)

[dinker]

If I recall correctly CloneZilla uses some weird scheme for identifying disks so make sure you know which disks are installed.