Move to smaller SD card...

[16vmonkey]

Hi all,

I've got my Pi working great as a Kiosk for a client and i'm using a 16gb SD card. I need to move to a smaller SD card but Win32 Disk Imager creates a 16gb file when reading from the SD as an image - obviously too big to fit on a smaller card like a 4gb.

How can I move from larger to smaller SD??

Mike.

[recantha]

The way I sort this kind of thing is:
* Use a Windows machine
* Boot up using the Live CD/USB from gparted.
* This gives you a Linux environment with the re-partitioning tool installed
* Use gparted to move/resize the partitions.

Take a look at:
http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/0 ... artitions/

I think that link is for expanding a partition, but should be fairly similar to shrink.
HOWEVER, make sure you back up your 16GB first just in case it doesn't work.
You may have problems going from 16GB to 4GB. Give it a try.

[dukla2000]

Think it is much easier if you have a linux machine, but a Live CD will do. I have been cloning my install to a variety of SD cards for benchmarking and am pretty much in a groove as follows:
Take new SD card - usually formatted as 1 DOS partition
Use fdisk to check the start sector (on the assumption the manufacturer aligns the partition with erase block sizes) - has been 8192 sectors for 8GB Sandisk cards)
Use YaST (the main toolbox utility that comes with my SuSE desktop linux) to shrink the 1st partition to about 50MB
Back to fdisk to create second partition with start sector on an erase block boundary (all of this cribbed from Terje's blog!)
Format the new partition
Copy the DOS partition from old card to new card - can be done on any machine
In linux mount both old and new cards - check in /media what they are called but for this example assume they are newcard and oldcard
The magic copy command is
rsync -axvS /media/oldcard /media/newcard

Yup I don't bother formatting a swap partition. I do add a swapfile once the card is running and can be done on the Pi itself, all done as root
dd if=dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=262144
creates a 256MB file
mkswap /swapfile
chown root:root /swapfile
chmod 0600 /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
edit /etc/fstab so the swap line looks like
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

[roblegge]

Unfortunately there's a problem here. Running a Terminal session in Ubuntu, the device partitions are shown as /media/<guid1> and /media/<guid2>. using rsync -avxS as suggested results in a folder being created in the target partition and all the files being created in that.

All sensible suggestions welcome

[RaTTuS]

you probably have to make
/media/oldcard
to be
/media/oldcard/

IIRC

[roblegge]

Thanks Rattus, one typo is all it takes to cause maximum outrage

R

[RaTTuS]

I know ...
I've done it before with nearly a terrabyte of data from site to site ,,,,