@Viss do this with ipxe and you have cloud scale server mgmt ten years ago

Reworking partitions on running system is always fun. Recently noticed that the output of already long-running process was not going to fit onto the destination partition. Luckily there was empty space on next partition so I shrink that and moved forward and then expanded the destination partition. It is nice how you can resize ext4 FS while running.
@Viss

@Viss looks like @bagder also accidentally wrote a linux installer. :-)

@Viss this is basically how I've cloned VMs without having clone permissions. Just used nc to pipe data between dd on each system.

@Viss my top tip on a Debian based system. Use debootstrap to install a minimal root folder onto tmpfs (eg in /run/ramdisk). Bind mount proc, says and dev into there and then chroot into it. Now you have a functioning shell which won't explode on you. Echo 'u' into proc sysrq-trigger to remount root read-only. Splat /dev/sda in relative safety. It's been a while since I actually did this at work but hopefully it still basically works. Luckily I can no longer remember WHY I did this. Hmm.