PI 4 128gb SD card

[cajsoft]

Hi, I'm hoping to set up a PI4 with 128SD card.. is this possible to burn an image "buster" that will use the full 128gb?

regards,
Craig.

[jamesh]

Yes, the install/first run automatically resizes partitions on the card to use the entire space.

[ShiftPlusOne]

As a result, the first boot will take a long time, so don't worry if you just see a black screen for a while.

[wildfire]

Been running my Pi 4b/4 from a sandisk ultra a1 128 Gb card from day one (before that one of my 3b+'s made use of it).

No issues at all.

[cajsoft]

Been running my Pi 4b/4 from a sandisk ultra a1 128 Gb card from day one (before that one of my 3b+'s made use of it).

No issues at all.

Hi, did you do an in place upgrade to buster from stretch when you had it running on your PI3 then insert the card in the PI4 or did you reimage from scratch ?

[wildfire]

Buster from scratch in place upgrades can be dodgy. Fresh install is a lot more reliable.

[cajsoft]

Buster from scratch in place upgrades can be dodgy. Fresh install is a lot more reliable.

Cool, its just cause a have webmin/virtualmin installed and it was a bugger to configure.. I met just do a new card from scratch and install webmin on it then create a cluster with the old pi 3b.

[american-pi]

I bought a 128gig SD card.

is it just me or is it difficult to re-format a SD card as Fat32 in windozeX ?
it came EXfat.... Try to format it, will only let me do is EXfat or NTFS, what about fat32?

The pi4b gives me the red flashes of nolife with EXfat and noobs copied over.

I had to use gparted in MINT to format my SD card as FAT 32 , as witch seems to be
required for the Pi to boot.

[wildfire]

Not just you.

FWIW I just burn my images with etcher. I avoid NOOBS like the plague. If you want a choice of operating systems then uSD cards are cheap enough give each OS their own card.

With etcher there's no need to format the card, you don't even need to unzip the OS image you're burning.

[HawaiianPi]

I bought a 128gig SD card.

is it just me or is it difficult to re-format a SD card as Fat32 in windozeX ?
it came EXfat.... Try to format it, will only let me do is EXfat or NTFS, what about fat32?

Yup, that's a problem with Windows. It will not format anything more than 32GB to FAT32, even though FAT32 supports drives up to 2TB (and can go larger with some fiddling). Old versions like Win98 used to do it, but it hasn't been allowed for quite some time (since XP, I think).

This program will do it in Windows: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index. ... format.htm

The pi4b gives me the red flashes of nolife with EXfat and noobs copied over.

I had to use gparted in MINT to format my SD card as FAT 32 , as witch seems to be required for the Pi to boot.

Correct. Raspberry Pi computers can only boot from FAT16/FAT32 filesystems.

Like wildfire above, I don't bother with NOOBS and just write Raspbian images to cards or USB drives with Etcher.

[coltrane]

Another trick I read somewhere, if there's no windows available, is using a camera to format the card (there's no file system menu, but I guess if the camera is old enough it will format in FAT32...). Then I could even use my android tablet to transfer NOOBS into the card.

[procount]

is it just me or is it difficult to re-format a SD card as Fat32 in windozeX ?
it came EXfat.... Try to format it, will only let me do is EXfat or NTFS, what about fat32?

You don't mention it, but I assume your desire to format the SD card as FAT32 is so that you can install NOOBS on it? Cos that's the only reason I can think of.
But for large SD cards, this is just a waste of time, because as soon as NOOBS boots it will shrink the partition down as small as it can and devote the rest of the SD card to the OSes you are about to install. So you've just formatted the card for nothing really and increased it's wear.
And formatting SD cards greater than 32GB is a bit of a challenge unless you know the right tools to use (like the Ridgecorp one).

But actually, the RPi only needs the first Boot partition to be formatted as FAT16/FAT32. Nobody said that first partition has to cover the whole of the SD card! It's just that it seems like the easiest thing to do (It was before >32GB cards came along).

So I came up with a few other solutions that might help people out.

1. Use PINN instead of NOOBS. It's a more fully featured version, but it is also available as an image file to be flashed with Etcher, or the new RPI Imager tool. See this post in my thread about the easiest way to flash PINN to any size of SD card, that does not require FAT32 formatting at all.

2. If you want to create a FAT32 boot partition for NOOBS on your large SD card so that you can manually unzip the noobs zip file and copy the contents to the SD card, then I created some FAT32 image files of various sizes on https://github.com/procount/fat32images. Just pick one and flash it to your SD card using the RPI imager tool. Eject and re-insert the card to find a FAT32 boot partition on it. It may not be as quick as a normal format, so choose the smallest size you can get away with, but it certainly avoids the FAT32 issue with larger SD cards.

[timg236]

is it just me or is it difficult to re-format a SD card as Fat32 in windozeX ?
it came EXfat.... Try to format it, will only let me do is EXfat or NTFS, what about fat32?

And formatting SD cards greater than 32GB is a bit of a challenge unless you know the right tools to use (like the Ridgecorp one).

The Raspberry Pi Imager will format SD cards of any size as blank FAT32. Just select the Erase option. Although, if you are going to use the Raspberry Pi Imager then you may as well just install the OS directly instead of NOOBS

[procount]

Ah yes - I forgot it has that option too.