How to clone a Hard Disk in Linux….

Well after many hours of messing round with various tools to clone a hard disk I went back to basics. I found the easiest way to do it was to wack both HDs in the same machine and boot a knoppix live cd. Then simply enter the following:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32522 &

Then you can monitor the status of dd using a kill signal as follows:

kill -n USR1 <pid>

Where <pid> is the process id of the dd command.

Takes about an hour to clone an 80 Gig drive. It is important to remember that the hard drives need to be the same size. Anyway, worked a treat for what I needed.