On Nov 7, 2007 6:01 PM, Kevin Hinze <rudie at sihope.com> wrote: > Howdy folks, > > I am looking for a standalone disk copy utility for imaging one hard drive to > another. For this particular application, I am using PATA drives. The source > drive will be ~250 GB while the dest drive will be ~400 GB. Is this just a one-off copy or will you be duplicating this image many times? Your email makes it sound like it's just a one-off thing. If this is the case, I'd just use the dd command. It should be present on any live linux CD you happen to have around - I usually use knoppix for this sort of thing, but it could certainly be done under a gentoo or ubuntu livecd as well. Once you're running on the live cd and have determined which linux device nodes correspond with each hard disk (with PATA drives, it'll probably be /dev/hda and /dev/hdb or something similar. Look through dmesg to make sure), you can run a command like this: This is assuming that /dev/hda is the *source* drive and /dev/hdb is the *destination. $ dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb This will do a bit-for-bit copy of one drive to the other. I've used this countless times, and it's never failed me. The dd command won't give any indication as to how far it's progressed in the copy, and since it's copying each bit (including huge chunks of empty space), it'll take a while. I usually start this sort of thing when I'm leaving work for the day - then I come back to a freshly-cloned drive the next morning. Make sure that you have no mounted filesystems on either of these drives while cloning them, by the way. -Erik