How to do disk cloning when Clonezilla doesn't list the external source disk

I wanted to clone an external SSD at 256GB (source) with internal NVME 512GB (destination) using clonezilla. (It had freebsd in it). External SSD was connected via usb-c. The machine was a Dell XPS laptop.¹ Each time I ran clonezilla, it wouldn’t show me the external disk. However, lsblk showed it and to make matters worse, if I chose the image to disk option, the external disk would show! I even tried with the latest Clonezilla live cd, “alternative stable - 20250620-plucky” and it had the same issue.

So at the end, I just did ran a DD command something like:

sudo dd if=/dev/source of=/dev/dest bs=64M status=progress oflag=direct

which in fact worked, even though Clonezilla was refusing to show the source disk.

Of course you need to fix the partitions (extend them) later becuase the source disk is smaller than the destination but the cloning itself worked without any hiccups.

🐎