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Forums - General - Good hdd cloning tool?

For some reason, my computer refused to boot linux distros, saying something about broke BIOS.

Anyhow, what's a good open source hdd cloning tool that you know of?

I want to dump the entire content of 500GB HDD into a 2TB HDD.

Then unplug the 500GB to use as external hdd for backup.



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So you've already got Linux experience? Personally, I would boot some Linux distro from a USB stick or Live CD - Puppy Linux for example is great (and btw super handy if installed on a USB stick).

And then simply use the powerful dd command to clone:

dd if=<HDD device you want to clone, for example /dev/sda> of=<HDD device you want to copy to, for example /dev/sdb> bs=1M



that's the problem, my computer won't boot linux, lol.

Not only that, I have to reset BIOS to factory default each time I attempted booting linux. I've tried 5 or so distros.



Galaki said:

that's the problem, my computer won't boot linux, lol.

Not only that, I have to reset BIOS to factory default each time I attempted booting linux. I've tried 5 or so distros.


Which boot loader do you have?



Galaki said:

that's the problem, my computer won't boot linux, lol.

Not only that, I have to reset BIOS to factory default each time I attempted booting linux. I've tried 5 or so distros.


Weird. I don't see what the bios has to do with this, but I'm not an expert. What is the specific error? What distro's have you tried? Are you sure you installed the distro correctly? What boot manager do you use? 



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Commercial: Acronis True Image

Free: GParted



I was trying to use live cd to clone the hdds.

Clonezilla

Ubuntu

Slackware

Puppy

Something like that...

 

I figured it'll be easier to just find a xp app that do the cloning and avoid the weird bios error.

 

I think it was slackware that managed to display the error saying something about BIOS error and it was trying to boot anyways but failed.

Clonezilla just show blinking cursor while Ubuntu telling me to try again or something.

 

The computer is an AMD64 version and I got the proper 64bit versions of the distros also.



Which was the last OS you installed?



mantlepiecek said:

Which was the last OS you installed?


It's running windows XP Pro.

I don't have a reason to upgrade yet.

I want to keep that home computer windows since i use it for gaming.

Linux at work.



Galaki said:

I was trying to use live cd to clone the hdds.

Clonezilla

Ubuntu

Slackware

Puppy

Something like that...

 

I figured it'll be easier to just find a xp app that do the cloning and avoid the weird bios error.

 

I think it was slackware that managed to display the error saying something about BIOS error and it was trying to boot anyways but failed.

Clonezilla just show blinking cursor while Ubuntu telling me to try again or something.

 

The computer is an AMD64 version and I got the proper 64bit versions of the distros also.

Weird. I have no idea what's going on with your bios...can you take a picture of the error Ubuntu gives you? :/