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.