help please - copy NOOBS to another card

[aaronmatt]

the only secondary school is prince andrew school whos deputy head is mrs penny bowers and the four houses are undens jenkins cavendish and dutton

[Joe Schmoe]

our current govener is mark capes and the solicoter general is morag stevenson who also happens to be my mum

Cool. Glad to hear it.

Really, I just wanted an excuse to tell the Reunion story.

[aaronmatt]

reunion story?

[Joe Schmoe]

reunion story?

Yeah, it's there (in my previous post). About the "country" of Reunion…

[aaronmatt]

whats the reunion story

[aaronmatt]

ok but can someone please help me

[aaronmatt]

dougie you still there you put in alot of effort maybe there is some left

[aaronmatt]

if this makes a difference it might be eacause i cant use one of the recomended formaters

[DougieLawson]

dougie you still there you put in alot of effort maybe there is some left

Since we have to assume you've wholeheartedly trashed the current SDCard (no matter what you've done and how out of date it might have been when you started) you have two choices:

1. Download 800MB down the slow wires
2. Wait five months for the next boat to arrive

Pick your poison.

[Joe Schmoe]

1. Download 800MB down the slow wires

Just out of curiosity, to which 800MB file do you refer?

Is that the current size of the "NOOBS" (semi-light - that is, it includes Raspbian, but no other OSes) ?

Is the true "light" version (network only) still being made available?

Would that help the OP?
(or is it just "pay now, pay later" ?)

[DougieLawson]

I've not looked at NOOBS lite, but it is going to pull the Raspbian files down the wire at some point. So even if it's 200MB to get NOOBS running there'd still be another 600MB to go.

[Joe Schmoe]

I've not looked at NOOBS lite, but it is going to pull the Raspbian files down the wire at some point. So even if it's 200MB to get NOOBS running there'd still be another 600MB to go.

Right - that's what I meant by "pay now, pay later" (either way, you pay).

BTW, is that a "yes" on what the 800MB is?

[DirkS]

AIUI the card is not thrashed, OP wants to create a copy of the first one.
At least that was the original question...

[DougieLawson]

AIUI the card is not thrashed, OP wants to create a copy of the first one.
At least that was the original question...

Copying a borked card gives you two borked cards.

[DirkS]

AIUI the card is not thrashed, OP wants to create a copy of the first one.
At least that was the original question...

Copying a borked card gives you two borked cards.

Can you point me to the post where it says the first card does not work?
I can't find it...

[DougieLawson]

Can you point me to the post where it says the first card does not work?
I can't find it...

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 62#p658462

[DirkS]

Can you point me to the post where it says the first card does not work?
I can't find it...

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 62#p658462

Nope, doesn't say the first card is borked. What I read there is that the second card doesn't work after trying to copy it from the first.
Looks to me he had a Noobs card and installed Raspbian. At this point a straight copy from card a to card b will not give you a working Noobs install.

Maybe 'aaronmatt' can shed some light on what the situation actually is...

[aaronmatt]

first off neither of the caards are borked they both still work and second dougie dont be so negitive

[DougieLawson]

In that case use your Raspberry Pi to run the copy from one card to the other. It'll take about 2hrs 30mins but should work (as long as the cards are the same size or the target card is bigger). I'm assuming you're using 8GB cards.

Grab a USB SDCard reader.
Mount the target card in that reader, insert that in the USB socket on your RPi
Boot the system to a point where you can login as root, sudo -i to a root shell or open a root command window.

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/sda bs=30M &

That will copy every byte from the SDCard that you're booted from to the SDCard in the reader. Leave the RPi alone running that thing so that there aren't too many files (like logs) that change while the process runs. It's a fuzzy copy but don't worry because that gets fixed when the target SDCard gets booted in your RPi. The bs=30M gives it lots of memory to play in and reduces the elapsed time (a 30MB chunk of RAM needs to be available). On a heavily loaded system you may need to reduce that, you DO NOT want to force the system into swapping.

It may take some time, but it gets Windows out of the equation and in most cases it will just work.

[aaronmatt]

ok thanks but can anyone dumb that down for me because i didnt understand a word of that

[DougieLawson]

ok thanks but can anyone dumb that down for me because i didnt understand a word of that

It's the LINUX way to copy SDCards

The Microsoft Windows way is with Win32DiskImager.

[aaronmatt]

si i need a usb micro s.d adapter

[DirkS]

ok thanks but can anyone dumb that down for me because i didnt understand a word of that

It's the LINUX way to copy SDCards

The Microsoft Windows way is with Win32DiskImager.

There is an alternative: http://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/
Download size is 250Kb (win32diskimager is about 12MB). It *does* use .NET (4.0 I think) but it can also be used from the command line (and then it doesn't need .NET)
I actually use this one instead of win32disketcetera.

Gr.
Dirk.

[DougieLawson]

si i need a usb micro s.d adapter

Everyone who's got a Raspberry Pi needs three SDCards and a USB reader for them. It WILL make your life easier. At the last count my three RPis owned 14 SDCards/microSDCards (in carriers) between them.

[Joe Schmoe]

first off neither of the caards are borked they both still work and second dougie dont be so negitive

Asking Dougie to not be negative is like asking -3 to not be negative.