Whenever it comes to cloning the hard drives of any kind, the popular open-source software Clonezilla comes to mind. But Clonezilla could be a little difficult for everyone to use as it base don Debian Linux. If you want an easier solution for cloning or imaging hard drives, then you can use free OSFClone. Just like Clonezilla, OSFClone is also available in form of a bootable CD or USB drive. You can download the ISO image and burn it on to a blank CD and it is ready to be used.
OSFClone is based on Tiny Core Linux and is only a 50 MB download. It works on all the computers including the older BIOS based computers as well as the new UEFI based machines. It uses the good old DD command to clone or image the hard drives. After booting into your PC using the OSFClone disk, you will see a number of options. You have to enter the number belonging to one of these options and press Enter. For example, you can enter 1 for cloning the drives and 2 for imaging them.
Cloning a drive requires that you have at least two hard drives attached to your PC. You can clone the source drive to the target drive which makes the contents of both of them identical. Imaging a drive or partition saves the byte-by-byte true image of a drive or partition in form of a file and again you would need at least two hard drives attached to your computer.
The imaging of a drive or partition can be saved in three different formats – DD, AFF, EWF. The older DD format is very well known and is compatible with almost all the partition manager or imaging software. The AFF and the EWF formats have their own benefits like storing the data in the compressed format and using least amount of the storage space.
Apart from these, there are some other tools like calculating the checksum hashes for the partitions, writing image to a specific partition and more. All in all, this is a very convenient way of cloning or imaging the hard drives.
You can download OSFClone from https://www.osforensics.com/tools/create-disk-images.html.