#Reimage hard drive free#

The output of the command will list each hard drive (ex. In order to find out which drive to clone, open a terminal and execute: sudo fdisk -l For example, dd'ing a 100GB drive, where all the data is at the beginning, and is only 10GB is being consumed, the resulting file will be 100GB in size. It will copy the entire drive, even if the used data is only consuming 10% of the beginning of the drive. This can be a live environment where one images the data of the computers internal drive.Дd is a universal command line program used for low level copying of data. An environment to perform the drive imaging.The filesystem of the backup location needs to support the filesize necessary to backup the image as one file.

#Reimage hard drive free#

For example, if you are imaging a 160GB drive, you should have 160GB or more free space to back up to. The location (remote file share, external USB drive, internal drive, etc.) where the drive image is being backed up to should have the same or more free space then that of the drive being imaging.Live operating system imaging methods, for example, physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-virtual (V2V), etc. the drive being imaged shouldn't be mounted). Exclusive access to the drive being imaged (i.e.Here are the requirements for drive imaging using Ubuntu: Please double- or even triple-check your target device to avoid such catastrophic loss. Improperly executing a command may result in partial or complete data loss. Please ensure you are comfortable with the information discussed before proceeding. This is different from imaging a partition, where one is making a copy of an individual partition that resides on a drive, or backing up individual files and folders. Drive imaging is a complete copy of all information on a drive, necessary to restore all of the data or entire operating system on a drive to the same state it was when the image was created. This article is dedicated to documenting methods of performing drive imaging (also called bare metal backups, or disk cloning).