Ghost for Linux is a software that can be used to create a clone of a hard drive. The software comes on a bootable harddrive, and supports several modes of copy.

The robotmobility project used g4l to clone the image of a working robot onto two other laptops. Notes from that procedure follow:

The first step was to create an image of the drive we wished to clone. We booted the computer with the live CD, which leads to a prompt. At the prompt, the command g4l launches the software. A few parameters need to be set, including compression for which we used bz2. The same screen where you set these parameters gives you the option to create an image on an ftp server.

We copied the image onto an ftp server located at 192.168.200.12 (belongs to James). Creating the 6.5 Gb disk image took over 3 hours.

We then booted one of the destination computers into the same live CD, and ran the same command g4l. At the options screen, we now chose to restore an image from an ftp server.

The restore procedure took several hours as well (about 3), and the status bar peculiarly measured beyond 100%. However, once the operation was complete (near 200%), g4l spit us back into the options page without an error. We removed the CD and rebooted to find the hard drive successully overwritten by a replica of the source hard drive.