A drive image would likely be fine - *IF* you have the same CPU (Odroid H2 - early units / Asrock) as the other user. However, they will be very large as it has to be a ‘dd’ image of the entire drive.

This is inaccurate, unless I grossly misunderstood what the guy who designed the setup told me.

Things I’m not going to discuss for $400 next please, Alex.

Or don’t, and just leave well enough alone. No need for all this paranoid hand wringing until Spooky is actually no longer around.

Sheesh.

1. Make a byte copy of your drive.
2. Wipe hands on pants

It’s not Joe. Please stop repeating this.

It’s not!

Yes; but. There’s always a but.

The asrock boards we ended up using do not auto-scan for the EFI file to set it up in the UEFI properly. That has to be done with something like efibootmgr — but there’s nothing tying a drive to a motherboard.

The odrioid board does UEFI better from what I understand and should pick up the drive on it’s own. It’s the asrock board that’s weird. That’s why the OP didn’t have instant success trying another drive, the UEFI didn’t recognize it. But if the EFI setup was done, it would have worked fine.

Just to put a bow on this conversation:

1. The drive is encrypted, of course, but not tied to any particular motherboard.
2. A drive image from the Odroid would not work on an Asrock mother board (NVME vs SSD).
3. If you replace your drive with a byte copy for any reason, you'll have to adjust the UEFI so it knows how to boot.

I wrote some directions a while ago for "if your bios battery gets replaced" and it actually includes directions/tools for fixing the UEFI for both board types, I had forgotten that we did this: https://soldmy.org/pin/rm/battery-replacement

*AND* Chris, the system engineer on this setup, is going to look into creating a new 'imaging' tool for setting up new drives that is safe for us to distribute. The tool Spooky currently uses to set up new drives isn't hardened for public use. If Chris comes up with a working solution for that, we'll have new utility, much smaller than a full drive image, that you just put on a USB stick to set up a replacement drive.

If you replaced it with the same kind and still have your drive in tact, follow the directions here: https://soldmy.org/pin/rm/battery-replacement - it's basically the same situation. If you got a different kind of MB, then those directions may not help.