A disk cloning program needs to be able to read even protected operating system files on the source disk, and must guarantee that the system is in a consistent state at the time of reading. It must also overwrite any operating system already present on the destination disk. To simplify these tasks, Bhavicomm does cloning programs that can run under an operating system different from the native operating system of the host computer, for example, MS-DOS or an equivalent such as PC DOS or DR-DOS, or Linux. The computer is booted from this operating system, the cloning program is loaded and copies the computer's file system.