I was just searching for a way to clone my laptop just in case disaster strikes. I found a cool tool called Clonezilla. It’s free, open source and very easy to use. You can burn a “live cd” or even copy the tool to a USB memory stick and just boot from it.
It supports a whole bunch of file systems: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows! Check it out.
Cool, but then again since you’re a virtualization fan, why not use the free VMware Converter and clone your physical machine to a virtual one? After all, this not only gives you a clone, but also more hardware independence and the advantage that cloning the clone after that means just copying files…
I could, but I still would need an OS to boot from…
Thanks for this tool and it’s open source. I to am a big VMware fan, but this tool provides the capability to create and restore an image to a physical computer. Huge benefit if you ever need to replace a hard drive to gain larger capacity. I’ve tried the single image version and it works great. Next I’m going to try the multicast version. Great for a test lab/training center where the equipment is close to similiar.
Thanks for sharing this link.