This is not strictly true. You can reproduce a band-limited signal as long as the bandwidth of this signal is smaller than half the sampling frequency.
For example, a signal that only has energy in the range of 9MHz to 11MHz has a center frequency of 10MHz, but a Bandwidth of 2 MHz. You could sample, and reconstruct, the signal perfectly with a sample-rate higher than 4 MHz. Any content between DC and 9MHz that would be present would distort the sampled waveform, though, and create artifacts.
Of course, nowadays most often one just uses a very fast ADC, and one can then choose a suitable sub-band by decimation (in a FPGA or ASIC), a kind of digital frequency filtering.
Undersampling was often used in older RF gear (and, maybe it still is for reaching the hightest frequencies? I don't know what's the current state of the art).
dd'ing to the target device, and then growing the fs to the full disk extent seems to be a splendid idea. Especially as Linux tends to replace quite a lot of code over the usual curse of updates...
For a cluster system I had built a netbootable system for reinstall that would restore a dump of the reference system's fs on a node and adjust hostnames, ssh host keys etc... Also was quite fast at that time..
At least for Windows there's now a way to install the OS so that it only occupies one continuous large filesystem image with the compressed install files, and only stores the changes to this frozen filesystem images in the "traditional" way. It's called "wimboot".
That way installing the OS mainy consists of copying this huge image file, hence the "physical layout of bytes on the disk" will mostly be fixed.
I'd guess that this could also be replicated in Linux, but personally I don't know if this is being done. I usually "debootstrap" or "pacstrap" my installs from a bootable USB stick :-).
For example, a signal that only has energy in the range of 9MHz to 11MHz has a center frequency of 10MHz, but a Bandwidth of 2 MHz. You could sample, and reconstruct, the signal perfectly with a sample-rate higher than 4 MHz. Any content between DC and 9MHz that would be present would distort the sampled waveform, though, and create artifacts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undersampling
Of course, nowadays most often one just uses a very fast ADC, and one can then choose a suitable sub-band by decimation (in a FPGA or ASIC), a kind of digital frequency filtering.
Undersampling was often used in older RF gear (and, maybe it still is for reaching the hightest frequencies? I don't know what's the current state of the art).