Clone a Partition
Cloning a hard drive partition can be useful, either as a means of making a backup, or for distribution of an identical environment to multiple computers. One would think it would be easy; unfortunately some operating systems seem to go out of their way to make it difficult. But there is a simple open source solution.
Steps
- Download the ISO image of g4u.
- Burn the ISO image to a CD.
- Reboot your machine from the CD, and follow the instructions on the g4u homepage to copy your partition either to another local disk or to a network destination.
- You can copy either a single partition or a whole hard drive.
- Boot your other machine (the one you want to install the partition or hard drive image on, if applicable) from the same CD and again follow the instructions to install the image.
- Remove the CD from the drive and reboot.
Tips
- g4u supports all file systems since it reads the hard drive in "raw" mode.
- If your machine cannot boot from CD, there are floppy disk images available too.
Things You'll Need
- Enough space to store your partition or hard drive image.
- An FTP server that can deal with large files (optional, for network storage of the partition).
