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.
Lmao they are huge these days! But I’m talking about a 40gb partition, cloning it to a 64gb stick.
You can’t even buy 2gb sticks anymore :/
Small USB flash drives are still available, you just won’t find them in the local stores. There are expensive, industrial grade drives from places like digikey and dirt cheap, no name drives from Chinese sellers where they will print your logo on them for free if you buy a hundred of them.
One partition is not enough. You also need to copy a EFI boot partition and create a correct partition table manually. And note that you cannot get a correct result when partitions you are copying are mounted. You need to boot some live system to do this.
I’ve heard that systemd-boot can do it with just one partition but I don’t know howww also somebody please eli5 BTRFS to me, my brain’s doing the full-sponge thing.
It is possible to boot from a single partition, USB live images work this way. But regular installation that OP wants to clone likely has a separate partition.