You can easily clone single hard disk or partition using netcat and your own network. However, software such as Clonezilla offers a partition or disk clone software similar to Ghost. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive.

Norton Ghost is popular proprietary commercial software. It is slow and takes lots of time to clone system. There is also Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition with multicasting and fast cloning system.

However, Clonezilla is a free, open source, multitasking and multi operating system software. With DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux [DRBL] provides a diskless or systemless environment for client machines) and network boot enabled client computers, the only thing you have to prepare is a Clonezilla server. The best thing is ~ you do not even have to prepare a bootable CD or floppy with Partition Image for every client computer.

(Fig 01: Starting Clonezilla Clone Software)

(Fig 02: Clonezilla and DRBL running under Ububtu Linux ~ click to enlarge image)

Download Clonezilla cloning software

=> Visit official project home page to download Clonezilla software.

How to: Setting up a Clonezilla/DRBL server on Ubuntu 7.04

=> A simple howto on setting up Clonezilla/DRBL on Ubuntu Linux

How to: Setting up a Clonezilla/DRBL server on CentOS / Fedora / RHEL

=> A simple documentation to quickly setup up Clonezilla on a PXE server.

Related tutorials / software:

• Our Guide to : Copy hard disk or partition image to another system using a network and netcat (nc)
• Another open source software to : to clone system / partition