How do I clone my Linux hard drive?

[joseph2020]

My old faithful 40 gig hard drive (sda1) is starting to make some bad noises and I am afraid it will die soon. I have a 80 gig drive (sdb1) already formated as ext3 with gparted, mounted and accessible on my Ubuntu desktop. I have all permissions for it.

What is an easy way to clone the 40 gig to the 80 gig? I want an exact copy , including the swap partition. I don't care how long it takes as long as it produces a reliable cloned copy.

I tried using Grsync, but the cloned drive came out to be nearly twice the size of the original. That's after I forced it to stop, it was still going after 13 hours (it's only 11 GB). Also did not copy the swap partition from the original. (that doesn't seem right)

I need something SIMPLE that will clone my hard drive completely so I can boot from it. And I ask to be given step by step instructions, as I am usually lost in the Linux world. I can do anything though, as long as I get easy to understand instructions. Assume I know nothing about Linux.

Thanks in advance

[b2bwild]

Get Ghost for Linux
Here --> G4L

[devils casper]

I would suggest PartImage. It is fast and reliable but its a Partition Cloning tool. You can create bootable images of each partition and install those to new.

Its available in PartedMagic LiveCD.

[joseph2020]

devils casper, b2bwild...thanks for your replies

no can do though, I am on dialup connection, both of your suggestions would take too long to download. Surely there's something included in Ubuntu thats easy to use (even for me)?

[kmitnick]

i am not sure if this works 100%
but we are going to partion the 80 gig HDD
first post the output of

sudo fdisk -l

NOTE: in fdisk l is the small letter of L
post the output here and we will continue later

[devils casper]

PartedMagic LiveCD is around 50MB. If you have LiveCD of any Linux distro then install PartImage in LiveCD mode and create images. AFAIK, PartImage script is less than 1MB in size.

[oz]

Hi, Casper - unfortunately, the Parted Magic folks have been increasing the download size of the ISO file and the latest version of Parted Magic is 88MB. I'm guessing that some of the older but smaller versions might still be available, though.

[devils casper]

Hi oz !

Older vesions are available here.
ftp and torrents.

[Skooter]

I tried to download partimage, but it didn't seem to work... I tried to install manualy like the site said, but when I typed in "locate partimage" after it finished, nothing was found, like it didn't install.

Should I use the LiveCd instead? Hdd space is not an issue, nor is download size.

[oz]

Should I use the LiveCd instead? Hdd space is not an issue, nor is download size.

I personally prefer running it from the LiveCD, but what is best would boil down to user preference.