Cloning HDD Step 1:Make a bootable USB Stick

If you have ever used a Sandisk USB stick you have probably enjoyed its inexpensive price and its reliability.  I've had several and they were always a good deal and have served me well.  The U3 tools though can be a bit of an annoyance, unfortunately reformatting does not remove them, you have to download special tools to do remove them.  Which is simple if you are on a Windows machine, unfortunately at home I currently have all Linux machines, and even a reformat in Linux did not do the trick.

Fortunately someone made a tool that will take the U3 tools off of the USB.  This is necessary because I couldn't make the USB stick bootable with this software on it.  In Ubuntu it was just an easy:

sudo apt-get u3-tool

command away.  The directions on how to use the tool can be found here: http://goo.gl/kqcjAs on the wilderssecurity forum. So with just a few keystrokes the USB stick was now clear and ready to be formatted and made bootable.

I looked at a few different options to make the USB stick bootable.  I tried using Tuxboot first, but it did not work for me.  After a little more looking around I found Multisystem via pendrivelinux.com  They have a simple walkthrough on their website where the software can be downloaded too, it can be found here: http://goo.gl/zwNVSd

After that it was simply following directions and installing a few .iso files.  I opted for putting Clonezilla, OSFClone, Gparted, and Trinity Rescue Kit on it.  Just so I have options.  (Gparted is not disk cloning software but allows the resizing of partitions on a hard drive)  Another option would be to put on just a generic Linux distribution and use the "dd" command in a terminal.  I may consider that in the future, but for my first attempt ever at cloning a HDD I would rather be walked through the process.