On Wednesday, 10 June 2020 16:06:01 BST Terry Coles wrote: > Nowadays I try to avoid the problem by shrinking the original partition a > bit before I dd it to create the image; you should be able to do it with > GParted. Then, when I copy it to the new card, the image should fit.
I think I was fooling myself when I did this back in the day. We bought a supply of Patriot 8 GB Micro SD Cards and I suspect that these had the most capacity out of the selection that I had from Verbatim, Sandisk, etc. I was probably using those... Anyway, I took an image of a card at the beginning of the month and when I tried to copy it to a new card, it wouldn't fit ;-( After various shenanigans I posted a query on the Raspberry Pi Forums and got several responses see: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php? f=28&t=277218&p=1679441#p1679441 Out of the several options offered, I managed to fix the problem using a tool called image-backup. It turns out that image-backup is only part of a suite of utilities called image-utils; see the discussion at the link for more info. I downloaded this and initially used the included image-shrink utility to reduce the size of the image that I had saved earlier. The process completed without error, but it wouldn't mount, so there is clearly something wrong with the original image. However I was able to successfully write it to a 16 GB card and it subsequently booted with no problems. So then, from within the running system, I used image-backup to save a backup of the running system onto a memory stick plugged into a spare USB connector on the Pi. This produced a 2.3 GB image instead of a 7.5 GB one and I was able to successfully write that to an 8 GB SD Card and boot from that too. (Note: Patience is needed because there is no feedback and it checks the resultant image before exiting.) There is an option to not expand the file-system on first boot, but now I know I can create usable images using this tool, I didn't use that. A highly recommended tool. -- Terry Coles -- Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2020-07-07 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk New thread, don't hijack: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
