Disk cloning

ServerAdmin content. Please ignore and move.

# from physical disk SDA to SDB:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror,sync
 
# from physical disk SDB to SDA:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror,sync
 
# progress monitoring - needed open second session and exec following command (results are showen in sesstion with dd):
watch -n30 'kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)'

Links

ArchLinux: Disk cloning