dtgreene: In a moment, I am going to clone my Raspberry Pi's SD card into an old laptop hard drive (that's basically an untouched Windows hard drive, except for whatever was put on it when booting it). During this process, I won't be on GOG. (Then again, shouldn't I be asleep anyway?)
Files on the old filesystem date from 2013/2014, except for a few (pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys, and swapfile.sys) that date from Janurary 2015.
I decided to clone the main and recovery partitions, but not the other small (<1G) partitions that are on the drive.
daisie678: Hey buddy! you explain the whole process, I really want to know what's your real concern? You wanna go to sleep during this whole process is that your concern? :D
Actually:
* I cheated by using another computer during the mean time.
* I have done this already.
* (Also, I cloned all the other partitions, just in case.)
The way it works is as follows:
Supplies needed:
* A Raspberry Pi. 4 is preferable because of USB 3.0 support.
* A USB mouse. (Don't know if you technically need a keyboard for this.)
* An SD card with Raspberry Pi OS, with a GUI. (If you need to clone a different SD card, you can use a SD card adaptor after booting from the one with Raspberry Pi OS. Also, there may be alternatives, like if you can get the rpiclone program under a different distro, but I didn't do that.)
* The hard drive you want to clone it to. It must either be an external drive, or be made external via a suitable cable. (I recommend reading reviews before you buy, and searching for Raspberry Pi, so that you get a good one.)
The procedure is very simple, once you have the software I mentioned::
* On Raspbian, go to the menu, choose Accessories -> SD Card Copier.
* Choose the source device (which can be the boot device) and the destination device (which must not be the boot device). Optionally check the box for new UUID (which will correctly update /boot/cmdline.txt and /etc/fstab).
* Click the box to start the copy.
* When done, shut the Pi down, remove the SD card, and if the Pi is capable of booting from USB, it should boot from the USB drive.
For booting from USB:
* On the 3B, you need to change one of the one time programmable bits; I won't go into that here, but you can look that up. This also works on the 2B v1.2 (these are not that common, as I believe they were only manufactured after the 3B, and most people would go for the 3B given the choice between them).
* The 3A+ is similar, but there is a drawback, in that you lose USB device boot permanently if you do this.
* On the 3B+, you don't need to do anything, as the bit is already set.
* On the 4B, you just need to update to a recent firmware, and then it will just boot (though recent ones may have the update already).
* On the 400, the firmware is already new enough to boot via USB.
* Older models can't boot from USB. There is a way to boot via SD card but run from a USB device, but I won't go into that here.
By the way, the annoying stalls that I've been having have stopped now that I'm running from a USB hard drive.
