Cloning single disk drive to multiple drives simultaneously

disk-image

I am looking for a way to clone single disk drive to more than one disk drive at the same time.

I have prepared system images on 1TB disks, and it takes almost 2 hours to clone one disk to another, and then it goes up exponentially, in order to have say 30 disks cloned.

If it was possible to clone one disk to more than single target, it would simplify whole procedure a lot.

Update: It seems like that the only viable solution is to use network cloning via multicast, as each software referenced in answers works in similar fashion.

Update 2: Can I ask answerers to tell me more about pros'n'cons of given approach? Can multicast work on any kind of network equipment? How about Unicast? How about reliability?

Thanks!

P.S. This question is cross-post from superuser, I hope that nobody minds.

Best Answer

I would use ghost in this situation. There are alternatives that you may consider such as Clonezilla or Mass Clone at trinityhome.org.

Related Solutions

Disk Image – How to Use DD for Disk Cloning

dd is most certainly the best cloning tool, it will create a 100% replica simply by using the following command. I've never once had any problems with it.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M

Be aware that while cloning every byte, you should not use this on a drive or partition that is being used. Especially applications like databases can't cope with this very well and you might end up with corrupted data.

Problems cloning a hard drive

I've done something very similar with diskparted and gparted from sysresccd. Sole spoiler is that it backs up/restores only partitions one by one. But the MBR can be saved as well, so no problems. Bonus: very easily "scriptable" by commandline, in case you need to do that more often, or want to make an "unattended" or "businesstrip" rescue cd.

Attention: gparted has a "round to cylinders" checkbox (checked by default) when creating the empty partition. In my install, I had to uncheck this and let the first (Vista's) partition start at 1 instead of 0 (if I recall correctly, but you will see).
If you forget to uncheck that, you will not have the possibility to uncheck it when you try to resize/relocate the partition afterwards. To have the partition start at 1 was mandatory for Vista.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Disk Image – How to Use DD for Disk Cloning

Problems cloning a hard drive

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