depending on the size of your disk image and your uefi+boot partitions it's still possible to safely pull off.

unmount the efi and boot partitions, write your image to the head of the disk, power cycle, then grow the last filesystem from the image to cover the rest of the disk.

you might get lucky and have all three of uefi/boot/swap to work with.

of course with the advent of uefi, you could instead just drop an installer image directly into the efi parition and boot that.