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Can I just use dd to clone my laptop to a bootable USB stick? (suppo.fi)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I know about Clonezilla and copy pasting partitions with gparted, but can I just use dd to copy a partition with batocera to a USB stick and will it then boot from the stick? Do I have to set the boot flag or take any other steps?

Thank you for any tips.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

It might work, but probably not without a little tweaking.

A lot of things will reference drive identifiers or drive path to know where to mount them. These things don't get copied by dd.

[–] Deckweiss 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

huh?

Isn't it the other way around?

I once cloned an nvme with dd and had to physically remove one of the two, because they had the same id and the bios couldn't differentiate between them and would randomly boot into either the first or the second one, inconsistently.

And removing either one would boot into an identical system with everything mounted and working. Which caused some confusion until I realized that the id was copied over.

So unless you didn't use the id in fstab, you should be fine. Sure the device path may differ, but that can happen anyway to usually devices should be referenced by id.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

There are different schemes that different distros use. Some user partition id, some use fire system id, and some use device serial number and partition index.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, so just update the UUID in fstab for the stick? Or is there more?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Probably all you need to do is check to make sure things look right, and actually test it.

I can't think of anything else that would be common that you'd want to check. If you're running weird virtualization setups on your laptop you might have to do more. :P

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

dd'ing /dev/sdx will copy all IDs

dd'ing /dev/sdx1 will keep UUID but PARTUUID will remain the same on the destination