I’ve been doing a lot of disk cloning lately, working up instructions for duplicating a “sysprep” style Fedora image for the LANforge product. Now that live CDs tend to allow live installation of packages, I can boot one, plugin in a stick with the archive of my raw image, and install pv and lzop and I’m off to the races.

First you need to destroy whatever was on /dev/sda first of course:

wipefs -af /dev/sda

Install your utilities:

dnf install -y pv lzop

Then throw on your image:

pv -pet -B $((1024*1024*1024)) /media/images/frozen-sda.raw.lzop \
| lzop -dc | dd iflag=fullblock oflag=direct bs=1M of=/dev/sda

I think this is super cool. After that gets thrown on the drive, you need to run parted on it to correct any partition glitches. Fsck the paritions after that.