Cloning dragonboard eMMC

Products Support DragonBoard410c
#1

Hi, I bought 10 dragonboards.
I want to clone (bitwise) the eMMC of one to another (clone/duplicate).
I followed the instructions here: Create a Bootable SD Card for DragonBoard-410c - 96Boards

I booted from SD card, did the ‘dd’ command to create the image of mmcblk0 and then doing the same on the other dragonboard, this time copying from the image to the mmcblk0 (after checking with fdisk that the name is right).

It doesn’t work. The dragonboard doesn’t boot. Maybe something with the boot loading should be fixed after doing to cloning?

Any ideas why? I need this simple way of cloning easily a dragonboard.

#2

Not sure why this would not boot.

Cloning a board comes with several problems due to “unique” identifiers being cloned along with everything else but I cannot think of anything that would prevent the board booting.

Note also that I would not recommend cloning the enitre eMMC. Normally if is sufficient just to clone to the large rootfs partition (you also need to clone the boot partition if you don’t have the same release/snapshot already installed on the target board). For best copying efficiency (and minimal eMMC wear) the rootfs image should be processed using ext2simg and, after such processing, can be written back efficiently using fastboot (or simg2img). I’m sure there was a success report on the forum in the last week or two in this area by a user applying the ext2simg technique.

#3

@danielt - you are absolutely right. It was my mistake.
I had a problem that my DOK was formatted as dos or ntfs, and when I did the dd, the output file was supposed to be over 4GB, and I got no warning for some reason. After I did the dd with ext4 filesystem, and put it on a different DB - it worked like a charm. Sorry for that!