Cloning multiple partitions in Ubuntu

Solution 1:

Just dd the section of the disk that goes from the start of the disk to the end of the last partition.

In your case the last partition is /dev/sdb3, so:

1. Find /dev/sdb3's end using sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb (End column);
2. dd the section of the drive that goes from the start of the disk to the end of /dev/sdb3 (let's assume that the end of /dev/sdb3 is on byte 50000000000 and that the target drive is /dev/sdc for the sake of the example): sudo dd if=/dev/sdb | head -c 50000000000 | sudo tee /dev/sdc

Solution 2:

I was able to clone to a smaller drive by the following steps:

Before doing this I prepared the destination disk by creating a replica of the source partition table on the destination disk as described by Malte Skoruppa here. (essentially you make the same size partitions on the destination drive before cloning). I used Gparted for this.

The method of cloning was to plug in an external drive that had working clone of my original install and copy that using:

sudo -s dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 & pid=$! while kill -USR1 $pid; do sleep 1; done

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2 & pid=$! while kill -USR1 $pid; do sleep 1; done

(this will give you the output as the data is copied)

Next was to reinstall GRUB which would also need to be configured, so I booted up in BOOT-Repair LIVE to fix GRUB. I selected ADVANCED mode to reinstall GRUB and purge the old one.

See also my thread HERE So with the help of many wise Ubuntu gurus I was able to acomplish cloning onto a smaller drive. Thank you to all who contributed.