How can we clone 100 hard drives with a normal PC?

October 28, 2005 8:54 AM

How can we clone 100 hard drives with a normal PC?

We have a need to copy entire hard drives (cloning) ... We have been using a Logicube Omniclone 2u, which is a device that can clone 2 drives from one "master". We will be cloning about 100 of the same drive for embedded systems.

Unfortunately, this device is no longer working properly and we cannot afford to buy another (cost is around $1800 USD).

These are just normal 40G, 7200 RPM, IDE drives (all with the same geometry), so it occurred to me that we could probably use a regular desktop PC to do this cloning. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do it because the OS on these hard drives is not a windows system (it's an embedded Unix varient called QNX).

Any ideas?

posted by jlstitt to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Easiest route: use something like G4U http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Or use Knoppix + ssh + the dd command.

Basically, you take you "master" computer and boot it from a knoppix disk.

Put one of the hardrives in another computer and boot this "clone" computer from a Knoppix disk as well.

Then copy the hardrive from the master to the clone with something like this:

#dd if=/dev/hda bs=10k | ssh $TARGET_IPADDRESS dd of=/dev/hda bs=10k
posted by gus at 9:10 AM on October 28, 2005

One of these might come in handy as well, although it is not clear how the performance would compare to the internal bus.
posted by mzurer at 9:15 AM on October 28, 2005

Why go over the network?

-Install a CD-ROM drive with a Knoppix LiveCD in the machine, configured to be the first boot device
-Install the "master" disk too
-Get 4 or so of those USB to IDE adapters and plug in your blank drives
-You could also use the two remaining IDE ports inside for two more blank disks

Boot, and use dd to clone.

This thread has some pointers on using dd to write to multiple devices at one time, using tee.
posted by chuma at 9:56 AM on October 28, 2005

Second g4u, but you've got about a week's work in front of you.
posted by plinth at 10:01 AM on October 28, 2005

There's a sub-$200 straight-IDE 2-way Omniclone here on eBay, if the power supply from your machine fits it, and a bunch of even cheaper ones from other manufacturers.
posted by mendel at 10:19 AM on October 28, 2005

Norton Ghost?
posted by kenchie at 11:56 AM on October 28, 2005

Seconding ghost - at a previous job, we would ghost from 1 40GB hard drive to another in about 7 minutes. It's a good program.
posted by dflemingdotorg at 12:40 PM on October 28, 2005

OK I managed to clone a drive using dd ... unfortunately it takes *forever* compared to the cloner. Am I missing something? Block sizes or something maybe?
posted by jlstitt at 1:12 PM on October 28, 2005

Try adding 'bs=1M' and see if it's any faster. (Remember to use 'time' to time it accurately).
posted by chuma at 1:24 PM on October 28, 2005

Please, please get at least four systems going at one time! You must have some old junkers around that you can enlist for this job.

I expect most any drive image program will do the job, but there might be little details that can cause trouble. I would use Norton Ghost because I'm used to it...
posted by Chuckles at 1:54 PM on October 28, 2005

Ghost is faster than dd because it's doing a file copy rather than block copy, so it's not transferring all the free space.

My vote would be for knoppix, dd, tee and a metric buttload of USB2 external drive boxes.
posted by polyglot at 3:12 AM on October 29, 2005