Clone ESXi Boot Drive

by Pei Qing

Suppose the original boot drive is /dev/sdb and the new drive is /dev/sdc. (Use sudo parted -l to check this.)

View the partition table of /dev/sdb with sudo sgdisk -p /dev/sdb.

There would be 5 partitions numbered 1,5,6,7,8. Remember the End (sector) of partition 8, which is the last one. In this case, it is 1843199.

Dump the data with sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1843200. Note that count is the sector number we remembered plus 1 since the first sector is number 0.

Fix the partition table with