Speaking of that, is there some way to move the grub bootloader to that USB drive so at least I don't have to rebuild that drive too?
Why, won't dd work? dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 is the usual command
But if you're booting from the USB stick, I think that sda and sdb will be swapped around, so dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1