Amit Uttamchandani wrote:
Hey guys, I am planning to buy a new hard drive for my laptop and replace the existing one. However, I love my setup right now and wouldn't want to change it. I know there are some FLOSS tools that can be used to image/clone hard drives. Any suggestions? Anybody have any experiences with this?
If you are planning on having the same partition size for your root partition, then you can simply use dd to clone the entire parition.
Actually, the dd method will work even if you want to have a larger partition on your new drive. First create the (same size or larger) partitions on the new drive, dd your current partitions to the new ones and use resize2fs on each of the new partitions to grow the filesystem the full size.
You may also want to look into partimage or clonezilla-live which is based on partimage to backup your existing drive to a remote server and restore onto your new drive. The advantage of this method is that only the used blocks will be copied (and optionally compressed) resulting in a backup size only very slightly more than a 'tar.gz'
Raj Kiran