Tips on Cloning Failing Drive

[broomeman]

I've cloned/imaged hundreds of Microsoft Windows drives over the years. I've never cloned a Linux drive. My Untangle box gave a single drive error a few days ago so I would like to clone the drive onto new drive. My hardware is a PC with a Celeron chip. Just spitballing here but I was hoping to power off the PC, connect a new drive externally in a USB cradle then boot onto a USB stick and clone the boot drive onto the new hardware, and then swap the bad drive out. Any suggestions on a bootable USB drive that would work for this? Or if I'm going about this all wrong feel free to warn me.

Alternatively I could perform a clean install of Untangle on a new drive and then import my configuration that I've backed up. But cloning seems like the simple way to handle a drive that might be dying.

Thank you.

[jcoffin]

I would just do a clean install. Way easier and cleaner.

[defcomllc]

I would just do a clean install. Way easier and cleaner.

agreed. Take. Backup, fresh install on new drive and restore backup. I've done it many times without issue

[sky-knight]

Clonezilla is what I use to clone Linux based systems, but I'll echo the above, when it comes to NGFW there is really no benefit to doing so. If you have compliance reasons to keep the report data it might be worth a try, but for most installs just start fresh and restore the backup.

Especially if you're changing NICs, NGFW does not like its network cards being lobotomized. Do the restore.

[broomeman]

Thanks, everyone. I will do a clean install and then restore.