Can I copy/paste cyanogen files to another SD card, plug it into a rooted tablet, and expect it to work? Long story short:  I've got 10 Nook Colors, each of which has previously been rooted, but of which 6 of the 10 SD cards have gone missing (don't ask me how).  I've also got 3 non-rooted nook colors that I'd like to root.  I'm using the tablets to conduct questionnaires using ODK.  If I take a SD card out of one of them and put it into another rooted one, it boots into cyanogen just fine.  

Plugging the SD cards into my computer (I'm running Ubuntu), I see that they have a fairly complex partition structure.  How can I recreate both the files and the file structure onto new SD cards, so that I can boot my rooted tablets into cyanogen?

Following these instructions ruined the tester SD card that I bought -- the computer now doesn't recognize the card when plugged in.  Not sure why -- I umounted it.  I've got the disk image file, the gapps file, and the cyanogen file sitting on my hard disk.  

Also, how can I root new tablets?  The uNooter file described here is a dead link.

Or is cyanogenmod old and deprecated?  Is there something else that I can do to get these tablets to run ODK?  

Help!
You probably can't copy and paste the files, because the blank SD card doesn't have the same partition structure and filesystem flags.

What you can do, though, is clone the original SD card onto the blank one. Note: the new SD card must be the same size (or larger) for this to work.

These instructions will make an exact copy, including partition structures, partition flags, and even disk fragmentation. It is an exact bit-for-bit copy.

Warning: This could mess up your computer. If you put in the wrong parameter for the of= part of the dd command, you could completely overwrite your main hard drive. Make sure you triple-check the destination mountpoint. Especially if you think the mountpoint is /dev/sda

Option 1: Mount both cards at the same time

If you can mount both SD cards at the same time, you can save a step and some time.


Insert the original SD card on your computer and find out the mountpoint of the original SD card. 

Open up the Disks application
Click on your SD card in the list on the left.
At the top right, just below the name of the SD card, it will list the mountpoint.

It will look something like /dev/sdc or /dev/mmcblk0 or similar.


Insert the blank/target SD card on your computer and find its mountpoint (using the same steps)
Open a terminal (aka command line)
Run the following command, but replace original_mount with the mountpoint you found, and also replace the target_mount with the mountpoint of the blank card. 

sudo dd if=original_mount bs=128M of=target_mount

The command will not show any progress until it is finished, and it could take up to an hour, depending on the maximum size of the original SD card (a 1GB won't take that long, but a 64GB might).


Option 2: Mount one card at a time

If you only have one SD card reader, you'll have to make an image of the original SD card, then swap the cards and write that image to the new SD card.


Insert the original SD card on your computer and find out the mountpoint of the original SD card. 

Open up the Disks application
Click on your SD card in the list on the left.
At the top right, just below the name of the SD card, it will list the mountpoint.

It will look something like /dev/sda or /dev/mmcblk0 or similar.


Open a terminal (aka command line)
Run the following command, but replace original_mount with the mountpoint you found.

sudo dd if=original_mount bs=128M of=/tmp/sdcard.img
The command will not show any progress until it is finished, and it could take up to an hour, depending on the maximum size of the original SD card (a 1GB won't take that long, but a 64GB might).
Remove the original SD card and insert the blank card. The mountpoint should be the same, but open the Disks app again just to make sure.
Run the following command, but replace target_mount with the mountpoint you found.

sudo dd if=/tmp/sdcard.img bs=128M of=target_mount

The command will not show any progress until it is finished, and it could take up to an hour, depending on the maximum size of the original SD card (a 1GB won't take that long, but a 64GB might).