SD card formatting difficulty

[swbigelow]

I bought a Pi B+ and 8 GB SD card with NOOBS from Adafruit. My son installed Rasbian successfully but there was no additional space found on the card. I formatted the card with SD formatter, (quick format with format size adjustment), copied NOOBS back to the card, and tried again. The screen for selecting OS came up, but once the OS was selected there was no available space detected on the card (0 MB). I formatted again with Full (Erase) format type -- the erase failed, still no SD card space was detected for installing the OS. I formatted again with Format Type Full (Overwrite), downloaded the latest NOOBS (1.3.10) and extracted it to the card. Then I got an error "Error resizing existing FAT partition. You are attempting to use /usr/sbin/parted to resize a file system. Its code is not as robust as in dedicated, file-system-spectic packages like e2fsprogs. We recommmend you use /usr/sbin/parted to only to manipulate partition tables. Warning: File system is reporting free space as
197149 clusters, not 219593 clusters."

I forged ahead with the Rasbian installation and yet again got the message: 'Disk space needed, 2762 MB'. Available, 0 MB.
Can you provide any guidance?
-Seth

[pluggy]

Have you followed the instructions here : http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/noobs-setup/ ?

In particular the use of the recommended SD card formatter. It sounds like you're trying to use Windows, which gets confused with partitions too easily to be usable.

[alwanbi]

swbigelow,
First you need to realize that NOOBS, in my opinion, is meant to be an exploratory way for noobs to discover different flavors of linux and other operating systems available for the raspberry pi. Since you and your son seem to be favoring raspbian, I would just go ahead and download and install the newest raspbian image from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

1. Please buy at least one more sdhc card to experiment with (at least 8gig).
2. Whenever you decide to re-use a sdhc card, don't forget that you will need to re-partition the card using a linux system (Once you have a dependable system running you can hook up a external usb sdhc reader/writer and do everything on the pi).

[fruitoftheloom]

Did you use ""format size adjustment ON""

Install Raspbian Wheezy standalone http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentatio ... windows.md

[swbigelow]

I sincerely thank those who replied to my query. To the first responder (Pluggy), I scrutinized the video in which Carrie Ann explains how easy it is to set up the Pi. She uses a Windows machine to format her SD card. I run Windows 7 on my laptop, and used the Windows-appropriate formatter from SDcard.org, as shown on the video.
-With regard to the comment on choice of OS, I'm following the setup instructions precisely, which recommend installing Raspbian.
- With regard to comment by fruitoftheloom, format size adjustment was ON for formatting. I have attempted to download the windisk32Imager as explained in the link sent, but the download is called something generic like 'download_setup.exe', and my antivirus software quarantines and discards it as soon as it hits my download box.
-Seth

[DirkS]

- With regard to comment by fruitoftheloom, format size adjustment was ON for formatting. I have attempted to download the windisk32Imager as explained in the link sent, but the download is called something generic like 'download_setup.exe', and my antivirus software quarantines and discards it as soon as it hits my download box.

The win32diskimager installer is called something like 'win32diskimager-0,9.5-install.exe'. Are you sure you got the correct one?
See http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentatio ... windows.md for a link.

Gr.
Dirk.

[swbigelow]

Praise Jesus it worked. Apparently there some kind of phishing operation going on the Win32DiskImager download site, but thanks to the most recent responder (Dirk?) I found the correct download and flashed the raspbian wheezy image to the disk. Many thanks to all who responded to my questions. Now it's forward into the happy world of Raspberry computing

[alwanbi]

swbigelow,
Congrats on your success!
Enjoy computing with the raspberry pi!