Cloning a Raspberry Pi disk onto a image file can be quite useful, as it will spare you from installing the whole system, applications, and configuration files that you set up for a specific project, using the Raspberry Pi.

By cloning the Raspberry file-system, contained in the SD-card to and image file, you'll have a copy of an disk in file, ready to be cloned onto another SD-card and ran.

the following steps will show how do this.

Resizing the partitions

Shutdown the Pi and remove its SD-card.

Insert the SD-card to you computer and run gparted software, as sudo.

Select the SD-card (/dev/mmcblk/)

Select the larger partition (the one with loads of empty space) and reduce the empty space, leaving a bit of empty space (around 2000 MB) for temporary files,caches,log files,etc.

When done close the Gparted

Clone

from SD-card to image file

sudo fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0

Will give the length of each partition, in my case it is:

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3.8 GiB, 4025483264 bytes, 7862272 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0004a452

Device         Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1         16   97727   97712 47.7M  b W95 FAT32
/dev/mmcblk0p2      97728 3766271 3668544  1.8G 83 Linux

What to look for:

Start and End units are sectors,
sector size is 512 bytes

To clone use the dd cloning tool.

The sector (or block size) bs will be the value of the sector size
count will be given the End of the last device (/dev/mmcblk0p2) + 1: 3766271+1 .
bs=512 is the sector size
if=/dev/mmcblk0 from /dev/mmcblk0
to image file (rpi.img) of=rpi.img

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=rpi.img bs=512 count=3766272

When done eject the SD-card and you'll have your Raspberry Pi image clone to a file

Clone: from image (file) to card

Insert the new card, to where you'll clone the image

sudo dd bs=4M if=rpi.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

expand file-system

using gparted you can enlarge the partition we shrunk while making the img in #Resizing the partitions.

Test

Once done,

eject the new card
insert it in the Pi
connect the network port
power the Pi

If all is good you will see crazy blinking leds. Wait for the them to stop and look for the Pi's IP address with

nmap -sP 192.168.1.1-255

Once you have found the Pis IP address ssh into it.

ssh root@pi.ip.address

And expand the file-system with raspi-config, since in the image we reduced the empty space of the partition.

raspi-config

Expand and reboot.

Cloned image is there.

Clone RPi

Contents