When to use:

Sometimes a drive might lose its partition tables for unknown reasons. Sometimes you need to setup a partition table to be identical to a drive in the same system, so that you can use them together with RAID(mdadm) or LVM or btrfs or whathave you.

COPYING PARTITION TABLES BETWEEN DRIVES (sfdisk for MBR and sgdisk for GPT)

MBR – sfdisk

To backup an MBR partition table using ‘sfdisk’: # sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sda.table

​To restore an MBR partition table from backup using ‘sfdisk’: # sfdisk /dev/sda < sda.table

Clone with the backup file: # sfdisk /dev/sdb < sda.table

Clone partition from SDA to SDB (copy from sda to sdb): # sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb

Confirm by listing(printing) partition table of source: # sfdisk -l /dev/sda

Confirm by listing(printing) partition table of destination: # sfdisk -l /dev/sda

NOTE: source and destination partition tables should match after clone (obviously)

NOTE: sfdisk -d is for dump, -l is for list

GPT – sgdisk

To backup a GPT partition table using ‘sgdisk’: # sgdisk -b sdX.gpt /dev/sdX

​To restore a GPT partition table from a backup file using ‘sfdisk’: # sgdisk -l sdX.gpt /dev/sdX

To clone a partition table from one drive to another using ‘sgdisk’:# sgdisk -R=Destination Source

NOTE: note the syntax is destination is first (not source) unlike the common other way where source is first. So keep that in mind and dont mess up the commnd

NOTE: sometimes that command doesnt go through so try with and without =, and consider the space (sometimes its best not to include it)

Other likeable forms (copy table from sda to sdb):

# sgdisk -R=/dev/sdb /dev/sda

# sgdisk -R/dev/sdb /dev/sda

​After cloning GPT tables you will need to randomize the GUID of the destination:​

# sgdisk -G /dev/sdb

Confirm by listing(printing) partition table of source: # sgdisk -p /dev/sda

Confirm by listing(printing) partition table of destination: # sgdisk -p /dev/sdb

NOTE: -R is for replicate (also known as copy or clone), -G is for GUID or randomizing GUID, -p is for print

Protective MBR?

NOTE: some GPT partitioned disks have a Protective MBR which is important if its a bootable drive, BIOS looks thru MBR only, this tells it that there is a GPT volume.