0

I have been doing a lot of research lately in regards to how to clone the file system of one USB to another, and I have accomplished a lot, however I think the final piece of the puzzle is why I cant seem to clone from 32 GB into 64GB. Here is a rundown of the process (yes this works properly and as intended). I have been using RHEL 7.3 and 7.5 for most of my testing, however this has been tested for SUSE and other distributions by my friends and it does work as intended. : 

 dd if=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=5000 status=progress | gzip > newredhat.iso.gz

this produces a compressed iso image which you can save to your desktop/desired OS and then re-deploy to whatever appropriately formatted disk to create a bootable drive. to deploy this image you issue the following: 

 zcat newredhat.iso.gz > /dev/preffered drive

I have succeeded in taking the first 5gb of a file system and cloning it to a small custom image iso, and re-deploying this to another 32gb USB. However The issue is that I cant seem to go from 32gb USB > 64GB USB. I have tried a number of different things such as formatting the 64gb into 2 32gb partitions which doesn't work. Formatting it as one large fat 32 file system using a linux test box I have which also doesn't work. formatting only the first 10gb of the stick as fat32 and leaving the additional space untouched, which doesn't work. I have seem to come to a roadblock, but If I can figure out what this final issue is I will have completed my research on a pretty significant personal project. This would promote being able to go from USB to USB of all different types and sizes with any ISO without having to use any third party tools such as Rufus/Unetbootin etc. I have been told that the prior parts of this project weren't achievable by others but I have found a way to make it happen and I am determined to finish this! All help is greatly appreciated and please feel free to borrow the above steps in your own endeavors to create your own recovery drives!

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    "doesn't work" – how? Doesn't boot? Doesn't mount? Doesn't expose partitions? filesystems? What is the partitioning scheme of the source drive? Superfloppy? MBR? GPT? Please provide the output of gdisk -l /dev/sdb. The same for the target drive after you clone.
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 16:35
  • It boots to emergency mode ONLY in the case that you go from 32gb image into a 64gb USB. When going from 32gb - 32gb it works perfectly fine. The issue im guessing has something to do with trying to lay the 32gb layout over a 64gb disk. The error seems to be cannot mount sysroot. Also as mentioned above this method works when going from 1 usb of the same size to another..meaning that it does boot in this case. As to the other case it boots but only to emergency mode. the issue seems to be an error mounting the filesystem (sysroot) probably because the memory layout is different than the 32gb.
    – RickwhoPrograms
    Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 18:02

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .