Linux Administrator

Easy Steps To Clone Your HDD (Hard Drive) Using dd

If you want to full backup of your hard drive you can do hard drives cloning. Hard drives cloning  is used for server maintenance. It is also useful for upgrading to bigger storage device.You can do cloning without any additional software.You can just clone your hard drive with dd program. dd command is used to do low-level copying. Using cloning full hard drive you can replace your hard drive with new hard drive without re-installing operating system. In this tutorial I am going to explain how we can clone our entire hard drive with dd command.

Note: dd command may destroy your hard drive entire data if you are not sure what are you doing. Please keep a backup copy of your impotent data.

Follow the below steps to before cloning hard drive.

1. Boot your system with Ubuntu Live CD.
2. Switch to root user
3. And make sure no partitions are mounted from the source hard drive.

I have took a small hard drive to copy it all data to new hard drive which has not been formatted yet. Before cloning your hard drive make sure you are working on right drives.

Follow the below commands to clone your entire hard drive.

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1873 MB, 1873791829 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 138 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225288 bytes
Disk identifier: Bx13084dffh

 Device    Boot  Start   End   Blocks Id System
/dev/sdal     *      1   65   522881  83 Linux
/dev/sda2           66  138   522112+  b W95 FAT32

Disk /dev/sdb: 136.9 GB, 136365211698 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 16578 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225288 bytes
Disk identifier: Bxc871c871

  Device  Boot     Start      End        Blocks   Id    System
/dev/sdbl   *          1     16577      133159721  7    HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 1873 MB, 1873741829 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 130 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225288 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table

As you can see above there are two drives first /dev/sda which has two partitions and second /dev/sdc which in not formatted yet. We are going to copy entire data from /dev/sda to /dev/sdc.

Note: Only you can copy a smaller hard drive to a larger hard drive but you can not copy a larger hard drive to a smaller hard drive using below command.

dd command usage

Follow the below command for cloning the hard drive.

# sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc
2097152+0 records in
2097152+0 records out
1073741024 bytes (1.1 00) copied, 54.13483 s, 19.9 MB/s

You will get some output like above after executed the command  successful.

Above we are using “if” as a input file is /dev/sda, and the output “of” as a output file is     /dev/sdc   with dd command. It will take some time if your drives are large. But in my case my drive is smaller and it took just less than a minute.

If we run fdisk -l command again, we can see that /dev/sdc has the same partitions as /dev/sda without formatting hard drive.

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1873 MB, 1873791829 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 138 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225288 bytes
Disk identifier: Bx13084dffh

 Device    Boot  Start   End   Blocks Id System
/dev/sdal     *      1   65   522881  83 Linux
/dev/sda2           66  138   522112+  b W95 FAT32

Disk /dev/sdb: 136.9 GB, 136365211698 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 16578 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225288 bytes
Disk identifier: Bxc871c871

  Device  Boot     Start      End        Blocks   Id    System
/dev/sdbl   *          1     16577      133159721  7    HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 1873 MB, 1873791829 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 138 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225288 bytes
Disk identifier: Bx13084dffh

 Device    Boot  Start   End   Blocks Id System
/dev/sdcl     *      1   65   522881  83 Linux
/dev/sdc2           66  138   522112+  b W95 FAT32

We can see that all of the data on /dev/sdc is same as on /dev/sda if we mount all of the partitions.

# diff -rq sda1 sdc1
# diff -rq sda2 sdc2

You can restart your computer to see the newly cloned drive.

I hope this article will be helpful to make clone your HDD (Hard Drive) using dd command in Linux. Read our another article Check and Update max_connections value to fix MySQL Error: Too many connections and Top 20 Crontab Examples to Schedule Tasks. If you have any queries and problem please comment in comment section or you can also ask your question.

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Santosh Prasad

Hi! I'm Santosh and I'm here to post some cool article for you. If you have any query and suggestion please comment in comment section.

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