Can I just use dd to clone my laptop to a bootable USB stick? - eviltoast

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.

  • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
    2·
    9 months ago

    Yes, but like @kuneho said, since “deleted” stuff only is marked as deleted (not wiped), there’s always a bunch of random on the “empty” space part of a disk, which compresses badly.

    Do cat /dev/zero > /path/to/mounted/partition/zeroes and delete it after cat errored out because no space, to fill the “empty” space with zeroes.

    • bartolomeo@suppo.fiOP
      2·
      9 months ago

      That worked really well! I got a 50gb partition with about 30gb free space into a 10gb zipped image. Is there any way to show progress during the operation like with dd’s status=progress?

      • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
        1·
        9 months ago

        I often use pv instead of cat for this. And there’s some ‘hack’ where some tool looks at some kernel feature to guess progress of cp & co. But i forgot it’s name.