Hi!

 

short question: Best way to create a bootable clone of sd card? I did some reading and found ">>create image on windows >> shrink image via gparted" doesn't work for me since I dont have a second computer running linux (will the linux subsystem on windows 10 help?).

 

In the past, I used the rpi-clone on a raspberry, but reading in this forum has taught me that hotcloning an armbian sd card via script is not necessarily safe.

 

Computers availabel to me are: 1) odroid hc2 running armbian 2) acer laptop running windows 10

Update: I tried to clone the SD card doing the following, inspiration from this thread: 

1) download armbian image, burn to another SD card (#2)

2) run armbian from this SD card #2 (works)

3) insert former boot SD card (#1) and backup SD card (#3) in SD card reader

4) dd if=/dev/#1 of=/dev/#3 bs=1M count=4 (to copy partition scheme and bootloader)

5) mount #1 /mnt/origin, mount #3 /mnt/clone

6) rsync -avSz /mnt/origin /mnt/clone (seems to work)

7) check /etc/fstab on #3, adjust UUID of /

8) try to boot from #3 --> doesn't work :-(

 

I don't want to (can't) use dd because the SD card #3 is only 16 GB, whereas the #1 SD card is 32 GB, and my armbian installation takes only 4,1 GB. And I understand Igor's opinion that it's much more useful to save /home/* and /etc/* and a list of installed packages, but I want to have a working clone handy for instant use in case the #1 SD card fails, mostly because I am planning on installing pihole and I am worried about increased wear on the SD card.

 

Can someone tell me why the approach aboce doesn't work? Does it have to do with /etc/fstab? Partitions? Thanks in advance!

 

EDIT: both #1 and #3 are high quality (SanDisk Ultra A1)

Figured it out, using pishrink, finally! It takes a while because 28 GB of empty space are being copied in the beginning, but anyhow ;-)

This is my procedure:

 

1) boot from "plain" armbian (#2, see above)

2) insert original SD card (#1, 32 GB) in reader

3) dd if=/dev/sd#1 of=/path/to/image.img

4) pishrink.sh /path/to/image.img

5)dd if=/path/to/image.img of=/dev/sd#3, #3 being the backup SD card, 16 GB

 

note: "#1", e.g. is "/dev/sda", not "/dev/sda1", since you need to do a block level copy of the device, not only the disk.

Old topic, but for those still interested - none of the steps above worked for me.

What WORKED for me was cloning using a new version of Balena Etcher.

 

https://www.balena.io/etcher/