Writing to, and backing up SD Card (Using Windows, Alternative Software)

[Tass]

@paulemm Take a look at my earlier link for DD for Windows - I have screenshots of what you should be able to see if you've completed the process successfully (using any mechanism).  Essentially you'll and a 70ish MB partition visible from My Computer, with an additional 1.5GB partition visible from Computer Manager.

[Dendennis]

Tass said:


Someone pointed out to me elsewhere that you can use 'clean' rather than manually deleting the partitions individually, but that has even more chance of deleting the wrong partitions then

It would be:

diskpart

list disk

select disk 1 (where disk 1 was listed as the SD card)

clean

Careful now!



Always forget about the clean command to clear the disk /card, guess i'm used to dealing on a partition basis cheers

[paulemm]

Tass said:


@paulemm Take a look at my earlier link for DD for Windows - I have screenshots of what you should be able to see if you've completed the process successfully (using any mechanism).  Essentially you'll and a 70ish MB partition visible from My Computer, with an additional 1.5GB partition visible from Computer Manager.



Yes thanks,I  have rechecked (had to remove the card and re-insert it before it read successfully) and things are very much as you predicted, though there is a second small partition (Empty) also as well as about 1.8GB of unallocated space, so I am likely to have a bootable SD card.

Must now go and read up on what to do next re how to use / set up the Debian version.

[Chris.Rowland]

A successfully written SD card will only show a small partition in Windows, about 75Mbytes in size.

This is because the other partitions are Linux partitions and Windows can't read them.

You can download an install a program that will read the Linux partition. There are a number around and a search will easily locate them.

[chaddy501]

THANKS TASS WILL TRY WHEN I GET HOME WHATS THE LINK FOR DD AGAIN CARNT FIND IT

[Tass]

@chaddy501 based on paulemm"s success with Win32DiskImager on XP i"d say try that again (let me know if you get stuck). Otherwise you should find the link ro download DD on my blog post above (DD for Windows) - don"t have it to have on my mobile.

[chaddy501]

Does anyone know if i download debian squeze to sd ready for my pi"s arival this week if i can view internet on my pi e.g. Facebook, youtube etc.

[Tass]

chaddy501 said:


Does anyone know if i download debian squeze to sd ready for my pi"s arival this week if i can view internet on my pi e.g. Facebook, youtube etc.



Well, it comes installed with Midori, and picks up an IP Address via DHCP.  I've had a few issues with stability that I haven't had a chance to look into yet.  Depending on the site, Midori tends to crash a bit   I've just tried out Facebook and it seem file, although YouTube won't play anything as it's missing HTML5 or Adobe Flash.

I've noticed that the CPU does tend to spike at 100% for 5 seconds or so whenever I try to load a page.  But this is straight out of the box - I haven't really looked around to see if there are any solutions yet

[chaddy501]

Thanks for the help time to get it sorted now

[LoPelut]

Hi all, I'ts my first post here.

I have an alternative to write the image into the CF, I used it to restore RAW image files (dd output) to USB and CF without problems. Check

http://m0n0.ch/wall/physdiskwrite.php

It's small console tool (includes GUI frontend, but in German); run "PhysGUI" as admin on Vista or 7, right click on USB/CF drive, "Image laden"->"Öffnen" and select img file. Check "Remove 2Gb restriction if dest is greater than this, and press on OK twice.

Help to remove partitions on USB/CF (source: same link as avobe):


If you are unable to delete all the partitions with the Disk Management utility, try the following procedure:


Open a command window as admin ("cmd")
Type "diskpart" and hit enter.
Type "list disk" and hit enter to find out the number of your drive.
Type "select disk X" (where you replace X with the number of your drive) and hit enter.
Type "clean" and hit enter.

Hope this helps.

[cplus]

I had the error "Cannot get a handle on the file" under WIn 7 and it's my own fault. I had browsed the img file from Windows explorer through the network and used the network share path (my pc is pc8) so the img file had the address /pc8/shared/debian6-19-04-2012.img in the Win32Diskimager Image File box. Note the forward /slashes. That's why it barfed.

After I corrected it to c:\shared\debian6-19-04-2012.img it worked perfectly. So check your file path and local files only!

[Jim JKla]

I've had no issues with 2g and 2g microSD in adaptor and 4g SD I seem to remember there was some issue with SD card brands with the prototypes.

I've been using Win32DiskImager on Windows XP pro and Home both with SP3 and I've don a couple of shots with the Ubunti linux graphic imageing tool (can't remember the name off hand but it's mentioned on the RPi site.

Thats full and empty disks and creating new images as backup using the Win32DiskImage tool.

I'd really suspect it's build quality on the SD card.

[Meccanut]

I'm a complete beginner with Linux and the Rpi, but have (err.....apparently) succeeded in setting up an Rpi and running it with an 8GB SDHC card. BUT having now read this blog, that sense of certainty has evaporated a bit.........

The uncertainty arises from the fact that I formatted the card on a Vista computer just before using Win32DiskImager to write a Debian Squeeze image to the card.

(The only difficulty yet encountered in running the Rpi is it would not run Python programs after compiling them. An error message indicated 'xterm' was not present (or was corrupted). But after using an 'apt-get install xterm' command to download 'xterm' (afresh) into the Debian OS, the program ran successfully thus indicating the 'corruption' had been rectified.

Assuming therefore that the Debian package is now correctly installed on the SDHC card, the question now is 'what partitions have been installed on the card as a result of the above formatting and subsequent writing of the Debian image' ??

Also how can one most easily check / read the installed partitions to verify whatever advice is posted in response to the previous question ? ?

Can anyone please assist with definitive answers ?

[mad-hatter]

Hello.

You can use almost any digital camera to format an SD card.

"Roadkil's DiskImage Vesion 1.6" will read and wite disk images from
Windows to an SD card or from an SD card to a Windows *.img file.
Works for me with Windows 7.

Regards

[Meccanut]

Thanks for that info. I shall try out the utility.

In the meantime I have formatted my 8GB sd card with my Pentax K-R SLR Camera and have come throughly unstuck.

After formatting on the camera, I tried to write to the card using my Windows 7 PC, I was blocked from doing so. I got the message that the SD card is 'write protected' even though the switch on the side of the card is NOT set to write protect.

I have tried re-formatting the SD card using another utility to that suggested, but again I get the same message and the card refuses to permit reformatting.

Methinks that any advice on this Forum, to format an SD card on a camera should be strictly ignored !!

[parabola949]

I got lucky - I formatted the 75MB partition to NTFS, then removed / reconnected the SD card physically, and it showed all 4GB on mine.

[bazis]

You can use WinFLASHTool (http://winflashtool.sysprogs.com/)
It supports multiple partitions correctly.

[bazraam]

Hi Everyone,

I am an absolute, absolute beginner so apologies if what I am asking is obvious.

Ok, I am now at the part where I have downloaded the Win32DiskImager and Raspbian image / files which I followed from this link http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.

I am now unsure what image or file I open from the extraced files from the Raspbian images / files to then copy to the supplied SD card, assuming that is correct and what I do next?

Hopefully this makes sense.

Your help is greatly appreciated,
Gareth