Clone a Hard Drive using Ubuntu Live CD

I have a hard drive-duplicator device. It works great if you two of the same drive. But I’ve had issues transferring from an SSD to a regular hard drive (and vice versa).

I looked into buying the EaseUS Disk Copy program (only works in Windows) but now they want a subscription? Hell no to that. So here we are, looking to Ubuntu for our solution!


EDIT: I used the following method to duplicate my Ubuntu Server backup and the copied disk booted into grub (no boot loader). All things considered, one of those duplicators found easily on ebay and Amazon are the best bet. They are much faster and more accurate. For the error I did get using the physical drive duplicator, it was easy to fix. I booted with an Ubuntu Desktop Live USB and used the Disks program to repair. No issues after that. The model I have is a Sabrent EC-HD2B and I have to say it’s pretty nice.

I found a great guide to duplicating hard drives using an Ubuntu Live CD/USB.
Balena Etcher will help you write the Ubuntu Live ISO to a USB disk.


Once you run the Ubuntu Live disk, open a terminal.

Plug in your first drive (the one that you want to copy).

sudo fdisk –l

Take note of what fdisk reports for this drive. It is likely /dev/sda

Now, plug in your second drive (the one you want to overwrite).
Run ‘sudo fdisk –l’ again.
fdisk will likely report this drive as /dev/sda.

Do not confuse the two drives. Here’s a sample statement that will allow your computer to copy the first drive to the second. Replace the drive names as necessary. In this example, sda is the source and sdb is the target:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

This process can take several hours. Do not turn your machine off until you see a report in your terminal that the process is complete. In my case, it took over 24 hours to copy a 1TB drive with a Mac Mini (Mid 2012)!

Example output when done:

1953525167+0 records in
1953525167+0 records out
1000204885504 bytes (1.0 TB, 932 GiB) copied, 102499 s, 9.8 MB/s

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