Destructive Incorporated

Cloning a hard drive is almost always the fastest and easiest way to migrate from one disk to another. There are several great programs out there that will do just that, the only problem is they're not free. Norton Ghost, Acronis MigrateEasy, and Partition Magic all have the required functionality to do this, but so does any bootable linux or *BSD distribution. Follow these easy steps and you'll be up and running in no time and still have a little cash left in your pocket.

Step One: Initial Configuration

The first thing we need to do is download a "Live" linux distribution. This can be any of a number such as Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, or Ubuntu. Take your pick, burn the iso, plug in both drives taking care to set the master/slave/cable select jumper to the proper setting (one master/one slave per cable). Boot your livecd and access a terminal (normally located under the system or accessories menus, also accessible by hitting ctrl+alt+f1).

Step Two: Collecting Information

Next we need to figure out how linux has decided to name our drives. There are a couple ways to do this-

Method A: dmesg | grep hd

for scsi or sata drives: dmesg | grep sd

Method B: ls /dev/[h,s]d*

It might take a little work but using that information and fdisk if necessary you should be able to figure out which drive is the source and which is the destination: sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Your drive might report NTFS or Fat32 in the "System" column if you are cloning a windows hard drive.

Step Three: Doing It!

In this example I am trying to clone sda which is a disk containing a linux installation. My destination is an IDE hard disk. I am cloning from a monstrous 23gb Seagate Elite SCSI drive to a 40gb Western Digital IDE drive. The new hard disk must be larger (to the megabyte, ie. a Hitachi 80gb drive is a little larger than a Seagate 80gb drive.) but then cloning should be as simple as: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda where /dev/sda is the source drive and /dev/hda is the destination

Step Four: Enjoying your success

Now it should be a simple matter of removing the CD, unplugging the old hard disk (or setting the bios to boot from the new one) and hitting the power button. Enjoy.