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.
Yes, with the detail that you will need to edit the bootloader configuration of your new system to actually boot from the right device.
If you also clone the partition UUIDs this probably wouldn’t be necessary (though many disk management tools may freak out when you use them on a system with identical partition identifiers) but there’s a good chance you’ll nerd to update /etc/fstab, possibly /etc/crypttab, and whatever file stores the configuration for your bootloader (/boot/grub/grub.cfg for example}.
What usually specified in fstab and other configs are FS UUIDs, not partition UUIDs. They are kept when cloning with
dd.Oops, you’re right, I confused them. I’ll update my post.
The same problem applies, though; duplicate UUIDs are not something disk managers particularly enjoy.