Clone a harddrive

This article will explain how to clone a drive for backup. This is not showing you how to make a raid, raid will be explained in another article.

Items needed

• The second drive could be smaller or larger as long as it is larger than the data on the original drive.
• rsync utility installed.

Attach the new drive

After attaching the new drive, boot up the machine. use fdisk -l to make sure you see the new drive. Use fdisk and create your swap 82 and linux partition 83 on the new drive. After that use mkfs.ext3 to create a filesystem on hdb2.

• # mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb2

Copy files

Mount the new drive.

• # mkdir /mnt/hdb2; mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/hdb2
• # rsync -avH --delete --exclude 'mnt' --progress -x / /mnt/hdb2

Make disk bootable

• grub --no-floppy
• root (hd1,1)
• setup (hd1)
• quit

Boot

Boot up your new drive, if you have problems then edit your grub at boot time and see if your kernel is pointing to the new drive.