I’m not coming up with a lot of useful (clear) results when searching for a solution to this issue.
Is it OK to simply dd the 128GB disk to the 32GB disk using count to stop after the 16GB partition was cloned?
A bit more context: I had to clone a 16GB eMMC and only had a 128GB SD around. Now I purchased a 32GB eMMC and want to clone it again. The partition holds a root filesystem for an ARMv8 device. I don’t have the 16GB eMMC anymore, that would have been the easy way out.
I’d use clonezilla
E: It’s not that it can’t be done other ways, it’s just clonezilla will work and has worked for nearly 2 decades. Also there’s no information provided above about the data. So clonezilla is nice if it’s a complicated scenario.
Plus, it’s a nice tool to throw in the toolbox once you know how to use it.
E. Why do you feel like you have to use something like dd for this particular task? Less than 16 GB of data? Ya probably could have copied it over manually by now.
It’s not an active partition/disk I want to clone. Clonezilla seems like something I need to boot into?
Yes, Clonezilla runs off a live USB. If it is large enough it can also store the partition you want to clone, making the whole process a lot simpler.
You can run clonezilla on your shell session, just apt install conezilla (or whatever variant you’re using) and it can do the trick. Dd will almost surely work too, but that leaves a ton of responsibility to you instead of making any sanity checks on the way. That makes dd very powerful tool and it has saved my ass a multiple times, but if you already have a working partitioning schema clonezilla has a ton of options to make your life a lot simpler and a likely a bit faster than dd.