I’m not coming up with a lot of useful (clear) results when searching for a solution to this issue.
Is it OK to simply dd the 128GB disk to the 32GB disk using count to stop after the 16GB partition was cloned?
A bit more context: I had to clone a 16GB eMMC and only had a 128GB SD around. Now I purchased a 32GB eMMC and want to clone it again. The partition holds a root filesystem for an ARMv8 device. I don’t have the 16GB eMMC anymore, that would have been the easy way out.
If I understand the problem correctly it has a pretty simple solution that I have done before. Make a new partition on the destination and dd if=/dev/diskAsB of=/dev/diskXsY
where A is the source disk and B is the source partition and X is the destination disk and Y is the destination partition. You may have to run fsck on the destination afterwards and maybe a gpt repair tool.
Honestly though, since it’s an ext filesystem, if it were me I’d just mount the source and dest and rsync.