There are many reasons you may want to or need to clone your hard drive on your Linux PC. You may want to upgrade to a larger or faster hard drive such as an NVMe SSD drive. Or you may have a situation where your hard drive is failing, and you want to replace the disk before it goes bad, and you lose all of your data.
Cloning a hard drive allows you to keep your operating system, programs and files intact without having to reinstall everything and restore from a backup. In this article, we will be showing you how to clone your Linux hard drive for free with Foxclone. One thing to keep in mind before cloning your hard drive is that you should do a backup of your files just in case you run into an issue during the process.
The first step you will need to take to clone your Linux hard drive is to download the Foxclone software and burn it to a bootable flash drive or to a CD\DVD. You can use a free tool such as rufus to create a bootable flash drive from the ISO file you downloaded from the Foxclone website.
For our example, we will be cloning a 64GB OS drive to a 107GB empty secondary drive as seen in the images below.
Once you have your bootable media created, simply use it to boot into the Foxclone software. You will first see a menu where you will need to select the Foxclone option. There are a couple of other tools to check your USB drive for defects or run a memory test.
You will then be brought to the Foxclone desktop where you can then double click on the Foxclone icon to start the software.
You will then need to click on the Clone tab and choose either Drive to Drive or Backup file to Drive based on your needs. You will most likely be using the Drive to Drive option. You can then choose your source and destination drives for the cloning process. Just be sure to choose the correct ones since everything on the destination drive will be erased during the cloning process.
Once you have everything configured correctly, simply click on the Clone button to start the cloning process.
You will then be shown a summary of what drives will be affected by the cloning process and also be shown a warning telling you that the target drive will be overwritten. If everything looks correct, simply click on the OK button to begin the disk clone process.
After the disk cloning is complete, you can restart your computer and go back into Linux to see the results. The image below shows the destination disk and as you can see, there is the 64GB file system partition and 43GB of leftover unallocated space.
Depending on what version of Linux you are using, you should be able to use the disk management tool or command line to extend the file system partition to use up the rest of the unallocated space. In Ubuntu for example, you can select the partition you want to extend and click on the settings gear icon.
Then you can click on Resize and drag the slider to the right to allocate the rest of the free space to be used for the file system partition and then click on the Resize button.
As you can see in the image below the file system partition has been resized and is now 107GB in size.
Now you can either remove the old drive and set the new drive to be the main boot device or change the boot order, so the new drive boots first and then use the old drive as a backup or format it to be used for additional storage.
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