I've been trying to install a few linux distros on a machine with hybrid strorage - /dev/sda is an HDD and /dev/sdb is an SSD , with /boot, /swap and /root on the SSD and /home possibly on the SDD or the HDD or as an LVM spanning both , all encrypted LVM ( except /boot of course) . The problem is the installers that come with the distros fails to install to the SDD and installs to the HDD with various degrees of success. These have failed:parrotOS-1.4 and -1.6 debian wheezy 7.7 kde amd64ubuntu 14.04.1 desktop amd64ParrotOS actually installs to the HDD only plain , no encryption , no LVM , all other options fail.ParrotOS uses debian installer.debian wheezy 7.7 installs on the SSD but the autoinstall gives bizarre swap sizes every time i try it's different size.The RAM is 4GB and it's supposed to have swap 2x the RAM , which I want expecting loads requiring lotsa memory and it gives me 1GB or less.  Manual guided install fails.Ubuntu fails to install GRUB to /dev/sda... no logs , no other indicators why.Kubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64 is the only one that has installed without a problem on the SSD.Question: can I simply manually partition the SSD, cryptsetup it , setup LVM and then   using a distro fully installed (not live ) on a USB drive ( which I'll boot to do all that ) simply copy that install to the SSD, change the entries in the fstab and crypttab and GRUB config, install GRUB to the /dev/sda , all without any use of chroot  ? Or is there something else I'm missing?
Installing Linux by copying?
linux;ssd