Forget dd for disk copying - use cat instead!

Instead of waiting an eternity for dd to copy one hard drive to another, you can use cat. It is way, way faster, and it will functionally work the same to clone a drive (grub will work, etc.). The following command will clone source drive /dev/hda to target drive /dev/hdb:

cat /dev/sda >/dev/sdb

Reference: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/144227