How to put a cloned image to another HDD [closed]

Quick answer... use the reverse (of / if) of your dd backup command to restore to the new medium. The partitioning and formatting should be automatic.

Other details:

Tested and verified on Ubuntu 14.04LTS

Cloned with dd (from 50 gig drive):

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda | bzip2 > /mnt2/datadrive/Files/now/image.bz2

Restored using dd (restored to 100 gig raw, unformated unpartitioned drive):

$ bzcat /mnt2/datadrive/Files/now/image.bz2 | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb

The restore process restored the the three partitions (sda1 (Ubuntu Install), sda2 (extended partition), and sda5 (swap partition). It left the other space (as identified by gnome-disk) 54 Gig Free Space.

An alternate resolution for cloning and restoring is Clonezilla.

This is a gui utility that will facilitate both the backing up and the restorer.

The only thing you need to be sure of is to make sure the restore-to drive/partition is at least the same size or larger than the backed up one.

Clonezilla has fail safe features such as to alert and refuse to process on insufficient available space. It also shows a progress status of running time.

Using Clonezilla you'll have the option of choosing which partitions you want to bring back to the new media. To bring back partitions you would first create the partitions using a program such as Gparted.

The gparted home page is: http://gparted.org.

Bodhi.zazen provided you with the https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DriveImaging link with details of usage.

The specifics from the page indicates that you should use the use the reverse of what you used for your backup... reverse the if and the of values.

Also, specific to your question, you may have to format and partition your target drive (ie. /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc).

When restoring to a larger drive Gparted can facilitate re-sizing and organizing the extra space.