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geerlingguy / rpi-clone

A shell script to clone a booted disk on a Raspberry Pi.
https://rpi-clone.jeffgeerling.com/
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
172 stars 10 forks source link

Feature question #4

Open irishmonk-57 opened 4 months ago

irishmonk-57 commented 4 months ago

OK, I'll confess: TL;DR. But I have a question:

I know that rpi-clone can write a copy of a "live" OS from an SD card to an NVME card. I used this feature last night to clone my SD-based OS to the new NVME, and happy to report that worked fine - I was able to boot from the NVME. Whoopee!

My question is this: Can rpi-clone write/clone a single partition from an image file to an unmounted device? IOW, if I had an image file on external storage (LAN, USB stick, etc), an SD card, and an NVME all connected to my RPi5, could rpi-clone write the root partition of the image file to an (un-mounted) SD or NVME card?

And apologies for the TL;DR question... I have read through the README here, but it's rather detailed, and I'm unfamiliar with rpi-clone as I only used it once in a "scripted" situation. The balance of this "issue" may be irrelevant. It's simply a description of the situation behind my question, offered as background which might lead the reader to suggest alternative solutions.

BACKGROUND:

I have a .img file created as a backup for a RPi5 by the program image-backup. Through no fault of image-backup, the latest .img file got "buggered up" - but all of the "buggering" was in the boot partition. So - I have an image file with a good root partition, but a buggered boot partition.

I had some issues with a recent apt upgrade, and the system seemed out of sorts, so I decided to restore my latest backup image. Without knowing that the latest backup image was buggered, I flashed the buggered image file to my SD card :( (lesson learned). And of course the system refused to boot. I didn't have the NVME when this happened, and after some flailing about I decided to re-install using the RPi Imager & the latest "Lite" distro from the rpi.com website.

In the meantime, I had an opportunity to inspect the buggered image/backup file. All indications are that the root / partition is sound, but the /boot partition is another story. This is actually a relief because the root partition has been extensively changed since install - whereas the /boot partition has not. Anyway - more flailing about ensued in an effort to restore the root partition - all unsuccessful to date.

So that's about it. I hope this is at least intelligible. I'm posting here because of the successful experience w/ rpi-clone last night. Apologies if it's horribly off-topic.

geerlingguy commented 4 months ago

No problem—IMO the primary mission of rpi-clone is to clone a booted Pi drive (all partitions) to another drive. Ideally it could be [any type of drive] to [any other type] (and maybe to/from an ISO at some point?), but I don't plan on adding features like specialized partitioning schemes.

irishmonk-57 commented 4 months ago

@geerlingguy Oh - I wasn't thinking on the lines of specialized partitioning schemes, but RPi does have 2 (or 3?) partitions now, and of course those partitions are all contained as distinct entities in the raw image file. I was wondering if there might be a way in rpi-clone to address my situation:

Unfortunately for me, the image w/ the buggered boot partition has a lot of work in it - but all the work is in the root partition. If I could "graft" a solid boot partition onto the image with the buggered boot partition, I'd have a whole, bootable system again.

Anyway, sorry for the bother. It's still early days for you & rpi-clone, and I'm sure you've got other things on your mind.