how to clone the harddisk?

[littlebig]

my system has partitions: /boot, /, /home and /swap. I want to clone the harddisk to another harddisk for system security reason. How to achieve this?
thanks!

[Pras]

You can use a disk imaging utility like Norton Ghost but I'm not sure if it supports ext2. Powerquest makes a product called DriveImage and I've used it successfully. There's also a linux utility called partimage. www.partimage.org (http://www.partimage.org)

[klamath]

maybe dd? if not, then use tar with pipes

[bigrigdriver]

You could try the Hardisk Upgrade Mini-HOWTO. It seems to have excellent instructions on how to do it. It worked for me when I upgraded my box to two HDD's.

[fancypiper]

I would pipe each partition to the new drive through tar. See http://oreilly.linux.com/.

I think it's in the "Living Linux" section.

[error27]

cp -ar /orig /clone ?

(I think it's a bad thing to use dd if you have a drive mounted. I could be wrong but I think it could in some cases lead to data corruption).

[Icarus]

Originally posted by Pras:
<STRONG>You can use a disk imaging utility like Norton Ghost but I'm not sure if it supports ext2. Powerquest makes a product called DriveImage and I've used it successfully. There's also a linux utility called partimage. www.partimage.org (http://www.partimage.org)</STRONG>

Ghost will work at copying ext2 or any other file system for that matter. As long as it can see the physical drive it will do a bit-by-bit copy of the drive. I use it all the time. But it doesn't do a very good job with sorting out linux partitions :)