Kevin Krieser wrote:
I'll second the recommendation for clonezilla. It knows enough about most filesystems (including windows ntfs) to only store the used blocks and it can use network storage over nfs, smb, or sshfs if you use the bootable CD clonezilla-live version. If you do a lot of cloning, you can also use the network-booting drbl version on a server that will PXE boot a client into clonezilla with the image storage directory already NFS-mounted. There is an rpm for Centos to install this.
The problem I had with clonezilla I had when I tried it once was I was attempting to clone a hard drive (windows) that had some bad sectors. Clonezilla didn't handle that well at all.
That doesn't sound like a clonezilla-specific problem. Have you found some other tool that magically reads bad sector?
Either in duplicating the drive from one drive to another, or when I tried to back it up to a file on another USB drive failed verify. Luckily, I had done a recent windows backup, so I went through the recovery DVD route on the new drive, removed programs I had previously removed from the factory install, then restored over itself. I spent a lot of effort trying to avoid that.
But - how often are you planning to clone bad drives? I'd try to use something like ddrescue to try to recover first. In the normal case, clonezilla does a good job.