We’ve covered Clonezilla before, a Linux based Live CD tool for hard drive re-imaging and clone. It does low level sector by sector clone, perfect for duplicating an exact copy of our existing hard drive. It can also be used for any hard drive upgrade or replacement. Since the clone/copy operation doesn’t happen inside Windows, you can use this tool to duplicate an exact copy of your primary drive that contains the operating system.
Tuxboot is a special tool that’s made just for creating bootable USB Clonezilla.
Here is How to Get Started
Download the tuxboot here. Run the installation, note you don’t need to download the Clonezilla ISO image the tool will take care of downloading the file for you. If you already have the ISO image downloaded, you can also choose to create the bootable ISO from the file.
Make sure you insert the USB, and select the corresponding driver letter.
How to Use Clonezilla To Create a Replicate Hard Dive
Once you have boot into Clonezilla, it’s a good idea to go by with the default setting.
Choose the language you’d like to use.
Keep the default setting for key mapping
If you are new to this tool, it’s a good idea to use the first setting. If you are confortable and know what you are doing go ahead and start using the command prompt.
In this case, we already have BOTH disk connected to the computer and we want to do a direct replicate of one disk to another. Choose Device to device.
Choose Expert for more option.
Since we already have both disk installed, choose disk to local disk.
Now it’s important to select the correct SOURCE.
Now select the destination, the new hard drive you’d like to make the copy of. The new hard drive doesn’t need to have exactly the same size as the source, just need to have enough size to hold the entire content.
This is VERY important, make sure you also check –rescue option. It will not case the operation to stall when failed reading a sector from the source of the hard drive. Check this especially you have a hard drive that you have been used for many years, chances are, you will have bad sector in your hard drive. Here is a tool, you can check if your hard drive have any bad sectors. Usually those are physical errors which are unrecoverable, when that happens Clonezilla will try it’s best to recover as much data as it can when writing it to the new drive.
Now just sit back and wait for the entire operation to be complete. This can take hours, depends how large your hard dive is. In my case, it’s taking over 6 hours to complete a 640GB hard drive data transfer.