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How to clone Raspberry Pi boot disk

These are the instructions on how to clone your Raspberry Pi boot disk to an external drive.

I recently installed my Raspberry Pi rack mount by UCTRONICS. The mount provides the possibility to connect a SSD to the Raspberry Pi over USB. Since my Raspberry Pi was already running from the SD card, I needed to clone my boot disk over to the SSD.

Previously, I tried using the rpi-clone tool, but ran into some problems that only seemed to exist on the newer Raspberry Pi OS versions. But more recently, I discovered this fork by Jeff Geerling that fixed all the problems I was experiencing.

You can install the tool using the command below.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geerlingguy/rpi-clone/master/install | sudo bash

Next, you need to clone the SD card to the connected SSD.

sudo rpi-clone sda

Finally, shutdown the Raspberry Pi, remove the SD card and power the Pi back on again. Your system should now boot from the SSD.

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