I spent some time researching solutions to this problem (after I had completed the task) and I found a program called ddrescue, which, according to the site, operates like dd but continues reading even if it encounters an error. At the time I couldn't find a way to tell dd to continue despite encountering a read error (though it appears as though it does have that setting), so I spent quite a bit of time manually specifying skip and seek to hop over the unreadable sections. It was then learned that dd doesn't handle read errors very well - there were several sectors on the disk that dd couldn't read, causing dd to give up and stop the copy. However, a while ago I had a hard drive that was about to die, so I used dd to try and copy what information I could off it before it died completely. You can also do a direct disk-to-disk copy: dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdcīut you're still subject to the above limitations regarding free space.Īs far as issues or gotchas go, dd, for the most part, does an excellent job. Third, if you copy this image to other drives (again, using dd), they must be as large or larger than the original disk, yet you won't be able to use any additional space you may have on the target disk until you resize your partitions. Second, dd provides absolutely no progress indications, which can be frustrating because the copy takes a long time. First, dd will copy your entire disk, even empty space, and if done on a large disk can result in an extremely large image file. There are a few drawbacks to using dd to clone disks. Once complete, image.img will be a byte-for-byte clone of the entire disk. Of course, make sure that you have proper permissions to read directly from /dev/hdb (I'd recommend running as root), and that /dev/hdb isn't mounted (you don't want to copy while the disk is being changed - mounting as read-only is also acceptable). To clone a disk, all you really need to do is specify the input and output to dd: dd if=/dev/hdb of=/image.img
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