Last Updated on August 30, 2026
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 much faster storage device such as an NVMe SSD drive. You might also have a situation where your current hard drive is rapidly failing. Replace the disk before it goes bad. You do not want to lose all of your data.
Cloning a hard drive keeps your operating system, programs, and files perfectly intact. You skip the massive headache of reinstalling everything from scratch. You avoid restoring from a separate backup. In this article, we will be showing you exactly how to clone your Linux hard drive for free using the Foxclone utility. You absolutely should do a full backup of your files just in case you run into an unexpected issue during the cloning process.
Preparing Your Drives and Bootable Media
We need to set up the hardware before we start the actual cloning process. For our specific example, we will be cloning a 64GB operating system drive to a completely empty 107GB secondary drive. You can see the initial state of these connected drives in the disk management images below.
1. Download Foxclone and Rufus
The first step you will need to take to clone your Linux hard drive is to download the Foxclone software. You must burn this ISO image to a bootable flash drive or a blank CD/DVD. You can use a free tool such as rufus to create a bootable flash drive from the ISO file you downloaded directly from the official Foxclone website.
2. Boot from the Flash Drive
Once you have your bootable media created, simply use it to boot into the Foxclone software environment. You must restart your computer and access your motherboard boot menu to select the USB drive. You will first see a GRUB menu where you will need to select the primary Foxclone option.
3. Bypass the Memory Test
There are a couple of other tools available on this initial boot screen. You can check your USB drive for physical defects or run an extensive system memory test. Skip these diagnostic options and press Enter on the main Foxclone entry to load the live operating system.
Running the Foxclone Software
The live environment runs entirely from your system RAM. It does not alter your existing Linux installation in any way. This provides a completely safe workspace to manipulate your storage partitions.
1. Launch the Desktop Application
You will then be brought directly to the Foxclone desktop interface. This looks and feels exactly like a standard Linux desktop environment. Double-click on the Foxclone icon located on the left side of the screen to start the cloning software.
2. Select the Drive to Drive Option
You will then need to click on the Clone tab located at the top of the application window. Choose either the Drive to Drive or Backup file to Drive option based entirely on your specific needs. You will most likely be using the Drive to Drive option for a direct hardware swap.
3. Choose Source and Destination Drives
You can then choose your source and destination drives for the active cloning process. Just be absolutely sure to choose the correct ones from the dropdown menus. Everything on the destination drive will be permanently erased during the cloning process.
4. Start the Cloning Process
Double-check your drive capacities to verify you are moving data in the right direction. Once you have everything configured correctly, simply click on the Clone button in the bottom right corner. This locks in your choices and prepares the software for the data transfer.
5. Confirm the Target Overwrite
You will then be shown a detailed summary of exactly what drives will be affected by the cloning process. The software will also display a bright red warning telling you that the target drive will be completely overwritten. If everything looks correct, simply click on the OK button to begin the disk clone process.
Resizing the Partition After Cloning
After the disk cloning is complete, you can restart your computer and go back into your normal Linux environment to see the results. The image below shows the destination disk inside the operating system. As you can see, there is the copied 64GB file system partition and 43GB of leftover unallocated space.
1. Open Your Disk Management Tool
Depending on what version of Linux you are using, you should be able to use the built-in disk management tool or command line. You need this tool to extend the file system partition to use up the rest of the unallocated space. In Ubuntu, for example, you can open the Disks utility to manage these raw volumes.
2. Access the Partition Settings
Select the specific cloned partition you want to extend within the visual interface. Click on the settings gear icon located just below the partition map. This opens a context menu with advanced volume modification options.
3. Resize the Volume
Click on the Resize option from that dropdown menu. A new window will appear showing a visual slider for your storage capacity. Drag the slider completely to the right to allocate the rest of the free space to be used for the file system partition.
4. Apply the New Size
Click on the red Resize button to confirm the new partition boundaries. The operating system will instantly expand the file system into the blank space. As you can see in the image below, the file system partition has been successfully resized and is now 107GB in size.
5. Swap the Boot Hardware
Now you can physically remove the old drive and set the new drive to be the main boot device. You can also change the boot order in your BIOS so the new drive boots first. You can then format the old drive to be used for additional internal storage.
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