How does one exactly copy(clone) a hard drive?

Hi I have a 500GB hard drive with 6 partitions and 3 OS's is there a program out there to completely clone the hard drive cause I'm always messing around with it and I have a spare identical 500GB hard drive.

 

superduper
but you can do it with disk utility
just set up the other drive with the same partition setup then just restore each of the 3 partitions from the target to the destination using the restore tab in disk utility
superduper does it too, but afaik it only does it for partitions too dont think theres a prog to make an image of an actual drive inclusing the partitons and retore taht to a drive in 1 step...

 

Can I use Carbon Copy Cloner? How to make the clone bootable (USB)?

 

Hello. Well, although Apple's Disk Utility might do it, I think you need a terminal diskutil command to actually successfully clone a multi-partition drive with different OS's on each partition. I believe the command was something like (google for specofics):

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

where "if" is the source device and "of" is the output device and "bs" is blocksize to speed up the copy.

A much better and cleaner solution is ironically to use a non-OSX solution like Paragon Disk Backup or Easus Diskcopy. You can make these utilities stand-alone bootable on an USB flashdrive.

I especially like Paragon as a free copy is available. It will clone (and restore) the entire drive (all partitions at bit-level) to an image file or to another drive. I keep it on a bootable USB flashdrive and use it all of the time to clone multi-OS drives, SD cards, etc. It shows progress indicators and lots of information about what it is cloning. It is "Windows-like" and therefore takes a bit of a learning curve but really is mostly self-evident. (I am almost totally an Apple OSX consultant).

I hope this helps!

 

I haven't tried Paragon. I use Acronis at work. Will Acronis work to clone hackintosh drives?

 

Yes, I've used Acronis True Image Home 2009 with Mac OSX / XP / Linux, Linux Swap and a FAT32 data partition with no problems on my AOA150

 

Wow good suggestions, well I'll try them over over the weekend and see what works.

 

Just find out that Acronis won't work with hard drive with GUID partition table...

 

I would highly recommend Clonezilla, if you're a semi technical user at least.

The GUI is not the most flashy, but it's free and it works well.

 

3 OS's - so I take it that means OSX, Windows and Linux?

You should stick to using dd / gzip. Google "pipeworks" as well, as it offers feedback as to the amount copied whereas dd doesn't.

I do this as follows:

pipeworks -b 5M < /dev/sda | gzip -1 > /mnt/sdb/sda.img.gz

Pipeworks is a free tool that gives feedback as to how much data has passed over its pipe. As you can see from the example, it reads stdin and writes to stdout. You can specify block size (in the above example, 5M) and you can also bandwidth-limit the copy which is nice, because you can set about using your computer for other stuff and just let the copy proceed slowly.

Or use dd:

dd if=/dev/sda bs=5M | gzip -1 > /mnt/sdb/sda.img.gz

To restore:

gzip -d < /mnt/sdb/sda.img.gz | pipeworks -b 5M > /dev/sda
or
gzip -d < /mnt/sdb/sda.img.gz > /dev/sda

Either one just creates a raw compressed image of your HD, and they are compatible with one another.

Others have recommended clonezilla or stuff.. they are OK. Knowing how to do it by hand is MUCH better.

I routinely image from one physical machine to another with pipeworks, gzip and netcat.

I should probably mention that the pipeworks source that is out in the public is 0.4 - there is a bug in that version which eats all available CPU time (has a tight loop w/ no usleep() call). I've patched my copy to sleep properly, but never released the patch because there doesn't seem to be a maintainer for this package -- though it is included in Gentoo, so maybe I should just send the patch over to them.

 

Solution!
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/download.htm

It perfectly clones your hard drive allowing you to tinker with things without living in fear of destroying all your good work. It does however take about 6 hours to clone a 500Gb hard drive.

You don't have to fiddle with boot disks or anything it's just a perfect clone your computer won't even know the difference.

 

I also use CloneZilla and it has been great for me. Not the simplest but definitely a good way to go.

 

This is the tool I use on my Macbook. I can, relatively, quickly make backups of disk images to a removable HD. I'm able to backup both the Mac OS X and Windows 7 images. No complaints thus far.

 

CloneZilla is the one I've used for years too, there are good tutorials online for you to check out.