Auto reboot to USB

[gkovacsp]

I have a 32GB SD card running raspbian.

I would like to regularly create a full SD card backup, but for this the SD card should not be in use.
I put a Minibian OS to a different SD card. I put it into Pi1S SD slot and it boots fine.

My idea is to
-use an SD card reader USB stick as an alternative system partition,
-use raspbian to modify cmdline.txt on the boot partition and redirect system to /dev/sda2
-reboot
-minibian boots
-reset the cmdline.txt to the original system partition
-create a complete backup of the SD card using the dd command. (Backing up to a network location).
-When the backup finishes the system will automatically reboot
-boot will take it back to the sdcard system partition, to raspbian

The minibian system boots fine, I'm able to ssh in to the new system but it does not accept my minibian login attempts, says access denied. (I've also tried to login using my raspbian credentials to see if the alternative boot did not work but it gave me access denied as well.)

Does this kind of USB boot require some changes on the boot partition to make it work?

Thanks for the help!

[broo0ose]

For Minibian.

Username is root and password raspberry.

https://minibianpi.wordpress.com/faq/

HTH

[gkovacsp]

Thanks, of course I've tried that and did not work. (It works when I boot straight from the Minibian SD card).

Something is messed up when the boot partitin is on the raspbian SD card and its system partition points to the minibian system.

[fruitoftheloom]

Thanks, of course I've tried that and did not work. (It works when I boot straight from the Minibian SD card).

Something is messed up when the boot partitin is on the raspbian SD card and its system partition points to the minibian system.

The RPi has both the ""boot files"" and the Linux Kernel in the FAT Partition, so does Raspbian and MiniBian use the same Kernel ??

[gkovacsp]

I'll try to figure that out...
Maybe the best option is to go with raspbian on both sd cards.

[asandford]

Might be less effort using rsync

[gkovacsp]

A full backup can be recovered even on windows, an Rsync requires a little more effort and also requires more skills than mine to completely restore a system. (file permissions, partitions, symbolic links...)

[gkovacsp]

I've just found out there is a raspbian lite, I'll go along with that. Thanks for the comments.