Re: Tools in Debian to create whole disk image (multiple partitions)?

[Gary Dale <garydale@rogers.com>]

On 22/07/12 02:05 PM, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> On Du, 22 iul 12, 17:38:58, Sthu Deus wrote:
> > Good time of the day, Andrei.
> >
> > You worte:
> >
> > > Any suggestions?
> > Why don't You copy Your installation w/ "cp -a" and reconfiguring then
> > grub for the copy - to another disk (USB one?). OR I'm missing
> > something?
> The Raspberry Pi can only boot from an SD card and the partition layout
> matters (e.g. /boot needs to be primary, FAT32, bootable and probably
> the first partition -- there is no bootloader like grub AFAICT).
>
> # parted -l
> Model: SD SD08G (sd/mmc)
> Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7948MB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: msdos
>
> Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
>   1      1049kB  79,7MB  78,6MB  primary  fat32           boot
>   2      79,7MB  336MB   256MB   primary  linux-swap(v1)
>   3      336MB   7947MB  7612MB  primary  ext4
>
> The ext4 partition only holds about 630 MiB of data (Debian base install
> + SSH server). I want to create an image that I can:
>
>   * reuse myself later (just dd to some SD card)
>   * distribute to possibly not very knowledgeable people
>
> Actually, I already have the image (with GNU ddrescue --sparse), but
> it's about 5 times bigger than expected, which makes it difficult to
> store and/or distribute :(
>
> Hope this explains,
> Andrei
So what you really need is a copy of the files on /boot and /. You don't 
need the swap space and you don't need the empty space in the main 
partition.

You can use fdisk to copy the partition information and a couple of cp 
-a  or tar's to copy the other files. You could even use dd to copy the 
boot partition since it is pretty full. This could be put into a restore 
script where you just need to identify the SD destination card.

However, unless the SD card is the same size, the main partition won't 
fill the space.