A walkthrough of how to replace a running Linux OS by piping a disk image directly to /dev/sda using curl or wget, without saving intermediate files. Starting from the classic Raspberry Pi flashing workflow, the author progressively simplifies the process down to a single curl redirect, then explores the challenge of overwriting a live, mounted disk. Attempts to write to the active disk cause a crash at 77.8% completion. The solution is booting into a rescue image first, which unmounts the target disk. The post teases a follow-up exploring how to do this entirely from RAM without a second disk, using early Linux boot tricks.
Table of contents
Why?No, like, why would you want to do this instead of installing Linux any other normal way?How to flash a Raspberry Pi the cool wayMaking your own bootable OS imageUnmounting the diskSort: