Hello, I know there is an option to “Clone drive” in balenaEtcher, but I want to know more about it. Can you only clone a drive to another entire drive in particular, or can you clone a drive to a partition in another drive?

Yes, the source drive will only ever be read. But mixing it up with the target drive will obviously kill it.

Welcome to the forums @Wolfy No, this is not possible. A drive itself can contain much more information like just a partition (e.g. the bootloader) and cloning a complete drive with different partitions into another partition is technical not possible. From a technical standpoint you could clone th…

Parted is not meant for that, you can work with dd or better if you want to do some special cloning which is not a simple 1:1 copy, use clonezilla. However, be warned. You have to completely understand what you’re doing there - have backups of files as you will very likely use data in the process on…

Backups of the files on the drive being copied to, or the source drive being backed up?

Also what could be destroyed in the process? (P.S. I am talking about cloning a drive to a partition of another drive that is bigger in size than the source drive)

One of the most obvious errors in using dd is mixing up the source and the target drive. So in that case you would destroy the source. I would recommend having backups of both drives if you try something more advanced. However, this is out of the scope of balenaEtcher and there is a lot of informati…

Okay, question about balenaEtcher again… If the source drive I am cloning is smaller than the target drive, would the cloning still work? Also, can the source drive be destroyed with balenaEtcher drive cloning too?

a) Yes, that should work b) There should be no problem, but I would always advise to have backups nonetheless. If the files are important, backup.

…Well, you see, it is actually for the exact purpose of backing up. I want to backup the entire drive to another drive, including the boot sector, so I was asking about this.

If you want to clone the drive to an exact replica drive, you can use balenaEtcher. If you want to do anything different, you can use Clonezilla, Acronis TrueImage or something similar. But backing up multiple drives to another drive while retaining the boot sector and stuff is not possible like t…

Cloning drive to a specific partition

balenaEtcher

Wolfy June 4, 2022, 7:58pm 3

Can parted and dd copy the boot partitions too?

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Cloning drive to a specific partition

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