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Make a Clone of Customized Raspbian OS

I will use a Linux machine, GParted, and a Bash script to clone, shrink and compress the instance of Raspbian containing OpenCV. GParted is a partition-editing application, used for creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking, and copying disk partitions and their file systems. The final result will be a compressed file like this:

USB adapter

The steps

  1. Pre-Requisites.
  2. Prepare the environment.
  3. Making a Clone of the custom Raspbian OS.
  4. (optional) compress the image further.

1. Pre-Requisites

  1. A Linux machine, not the Raspberry.
  2. A working instance of the Raspbian OS.

2. Prepare the environment

1.Install gparted 

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sudo apt-get install gparted

2.Using a USB adapter connect the SDcard to the Linux machine. USB adapter

3. Making a Clone of the custom Raspbian OS

1.Find the USB with the Raspbian OS.

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sudo fdisk -l

2. Clone the Raspbian OS.

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sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/your/path/to/clone.img

where:

  • if Stand for the Input file, this is the path to the USB with the Raspbian OS.
  • of Stand for the Output file, where we will save the clone OS.

3. Shrinking the image

The clone can be shrunk further ( in some cases the clone can be 16GB), so it is a good idea to shrink it. For the process, one can use the script pishrink by Drewsif:

GitHub - Drewsif/PiShrink: Make your pi images smaller!

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wget <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Drewsif/PiShrink/master/pishrink.sh>
chmod +x pishrink.sh
sudo mv pishrink.sh /usr/local/bin

to execute the script 

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sudo pishrink.sh /your/path/to/clone.img /your/path/to/shrink_image.img

4. (optional) Compress the image further

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gzip -9 /your/path/to/shrink_image.img