Advanced users • Rpi-clone and cmdline.txt

I use rpi-clone -q -l sda in my Rpi5's crontab. It reported that it was cloning itself, so I dug in.

I tried booting without the SD card attached via a USB adapter, but that didn't work. I found that cmdline.txt listed the SD card's PARTUUID, so I swapped the SD cards between the onboard slot and the USB adapter. So far, so good.

I thought: Why not set root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 in cmdline.txt, so a similar error would not occur anymore? Then I read on https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone:

If fstab and cmdline.txt use PARTUUID as is the case in recent Raspbian distributions, rpi-clone always edits** the destination fstab and cmdline.txt to use the PARTUUID of the destination disk.

Would it contradict developments in Raspbian? Or is there any other reason why it is not such a good idea? Any idea what went wrong with the cloning?

Statistics: Posted by PaulGuijt — Wed Jan 21, 2026 3:53 pm — Replies 2 — Views 43

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