Create Ghost image of Hard Disk

How to create ghost image of hard disk for

free?

If yes then you are the person who want to backup complete disk 

along with OS. So lets see how we can create hard disk image or 

ghost image or disk clone without using those highly priced ghost 

creating software.

Requirements:

Ubuntu Live CD/DVD, A hard disk with more capacity than the one 

you want to clone and some basic knowledge of Linux.

Procedure:

Linux provides disk dumping feature, this feature can be used for 

creating complete backup of any possible storage media. And we 

will use this feature of Linux command shell to create ghost 

images. While writing this tutorial I am assuming that you want 

to backup a hard disk which already have an OS installed in it.

Boot from Ubuntu Live CD/DVD

Now mount the hard disk you want to take backup on /mnt folder

Now take backup using following commands,

[root@localhost~]dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/image.img

this will create complete image of hard disk partition sda1, next 

you must take backup of partition table,

[root@localhost~]#dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/partitiontable.img count=0 bs=512

or

[root@localhost~]#dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/partitiontable.img count=0 bs=1024

Now while restoring first restore partition table on new hard disk

[root@localhost~]#dd if=/mnt/partitiontable.img of=/dev/sda 
count=0 bs=512or

[root@localhost~]#dd if=/mnt/partitiontable.img of=/dev/sda 
count=0 bs=1024

Finally restore ghost image,

[root@localhost~]#partprobe /dev/sda[root@localhost~]#dd 

if=/mnt/image.img of=/dev/sda1

Now please note that when you'll create ghost image no matter 

what amount of data you have in disk your ghost disk will be of 

actual size of source hard disk, that means if your source hard 

disk is 40GB in size then your ghost hard disk will also be of 

40GB. If you think above tutorial was little geeky then even I 

don't take different view from you, yes its really little geeky 

but believe me its not that difficult. If you loved reading this 

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