Raspberry Pi Forums

Hello all,

I have been looking into a project to create a portable disk cloning system, with partition and forensic capability.

I want to make a cheap, and feature rich product to rival the likes of the logicube sonix, but without the $1,000+ price tag. (Just for my use, not to sell lol)

I was planning on using a USB dock for the sata drives, and then maybe a small lcd so I could select from the menu what I want to do, clone from disk run diagnostics etc.

Can anyone give me some ideas on where to start or if this has been done.

Thanks.

you can probably just take two external docks/enclosures and plug them in through a usb hub, then use dd command to clone the drive. The only thing I can think of that wouldnt work is if you only used one hdd and try to use the SD card to hold the image because of the size of the SD card being much smaller than any modern day harddrives. but using two exclosures/docks and using dd command should work.

How Portable ?

I thought about using the Pi for something similar, but my idea involved a Micro ATX case with an ATX power supply to power the HDDs and Pi
A USB Hub
a couple of these 2 -
http://dx.com/p/usb-2-0-to-sata-esata-b ... ngle-18852
http://dx.com/p/professional-hot-swap-3 ... awer-19704
and then built a circuit to turn power on to the Pi and Hard drives.

Then going further, add in a touch screen into the side of the case as well.

This could all be built into a suitcase or something as well but I don't have the skills to do that haha.

probably not really that portable but would be much cheaper than a professional solution anyways. everything could probably fit in a simple mini itx case or mini-atx case without much issue.

my opinion, it'd be good for most people, but for me, portable is a laptop/netbook, and no wires running everywhere

Hey spudnet,

I am too working on this exactly same project. I would like to know the progress so far please.

I think we should get in touch. I didn't find your contact info. Please let me know.
Email Me- [email protected]

check this out:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux- ... s-with-dd/

If you wanted to duplicate an existing drive to another, you would obtain a drive of the same (or larger) size. Assuming the drive to copy is /dev/sda and the destination drive is /dev/sdb, first use fdisk to recreate the appropriately-sized partitions, then use dd to do the actual cloning:

# sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb

# fdisk -l /dev/sda; fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Compare the output of the two fdisk commands and make sure the partitions on /dev/sdb match those on /dev/sda. Once this is done, you can copy each partition using:

# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1

# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1

# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2

…

The first dd call copies the MBR from the first disk to the second. This will allow the second disk to be booted, when it replaces the first. The first 446 bytes are copied with this command; that is the boot code we need.

Depending on the size of the disk and partitions, this could take some time, but the end result will be a perfectly cloned system. For best results, if you do intend to replace the one drive with another, use a LiveCD or USB boot instead of booting off of /dev/sda; this will ensure that nothing changes on-disk during the copy.

Hi!
Been trying to make the same now...have anyone of u been successful?
Please share guide and oblige, also what i have understood is that "dd" command will also copy sectors which are not used ie. blank sectors from source to destination , making the process take more time.

spudnet wrote:Can anyone give me some ideas on where to start or if this has been done.

Have you looked at http://clonezilla.org/ this is set of bash and perl scripts, which you can try to port to RPI. It should not be so difficult. If you do not want to work with full screen and keyboard - think about any small spi lcd display and simple rotary encoder / switch - look at my recent project for a local menu. You can stay with a text console and do not use pygame graphics.

However, cloning driver over usb2 can take ages . As there is no known way (according to my knowledge) to directly attached sata controller to RPI (not over usb) please think if you can accept the expected future (rather low) performance. Here is a good starting point for further reading.

is there any progress with the project ?
trying to make that proj as well

Hi,

I know the post is old. But recently I've created a python app for imaging, the source code is at https://github.com/johntcw/Forensic-Imager

Hope this helps.
John

johntcw thank you for the app.
I have some questions. Work for example froma disk from 1Tb (10% used) to a 240Gb ssd disk?
Thank you!!