Raspberry Pi Forums

Greetings.

I've just ordered an USB hard drive to replace the SD card as Pi's storage. And now I'm thinking about how to set it up.

I have another smaller SD card with a modified cmdline.txt to direct the boot via sda device. I used it to boot via an USB flash drive. I'm planning using it to boot up Pi via the USB hard drive.

Can I just 'dd' everything from the current running SD card to the hard drive, and after booting up the Pi, I use raspi-config to expand the file system?

I don't want to set everything up from scratch.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 29&t=44177

You don't have to start with a fresh Raspbian install (as decribed in this tutorial), but can use your existing installation instead.

gkreidl wrote:http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 29&t=44177

You don't have to start with a fresh Raspbian install (as decribed in this tutorial), but can use your existing installation instead.

Thanks, this topic is great.

It told me that I could use rsync to copy the content instead of dd, as it won't copy blank space, so would be faster.

I'll try it when my hard drive arrives.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 14#p122476 may also help

The file transfer from SD card to hard drive can be done on a computer if this is what you mean.

emma24xia wrote:The file transfer from SD card to hard drive can be done on a computer if this is what you mean.

The Raspberry Pi is a computer.

It cannot be done on a Windows machine.