SD card image writing - I'm puzzled

[prodata]

Newish to Linux and would appreciate some clarification

OK got a brand new Samsung 'Essential' 4GB SDHC Class 4 card (£9 or so from Maplin). Downloaded the debian6-13-04-2012 image, which unzips to 1.9GB or so.

Ran Win32DiskImager as suggested, from a Vista Business PC. All seemed to proceed smoothly and taking maybe 5mins.

Looking at the written card in Windows I see a file listing of 11 files with the biggest being: kernel.emergency.img at ca 16MB and a total of maybe 30MB files visible.

Q: Where are the files corresponding to the rest of the huge img download? I'm guessing on a different partition invisible to Windows (all files accessible to Windows including hidden/OS etc are set to be visible).

No Pi yet to check whether the card is functional so this is just for my education. Has the imaging failed or are 98+% of the img files invisible to Windows?

[croston]

You are right - most of the data is in another partition that is invisible to Windows. All you can see is the /boot partition which holds the GPU blob, the kernel and a few miscellaneous files.

[Vindicator]

Go to control panel/administrative tools/computer management/storage/disk management(snap in) and look at the removable drive usually like disk 3 or so and you should see 4 partitions on the SD-card 75MB/1.55GB/191MB/and the rest showing unallocated if your card is right in the 75MB partition if you click in my computer you should see like 11 files in the partition.

The admin tool will not show the type of partitions but will show their existence and their sizes to you

Hope this helps

[EarthlyPangaea]

If it helps, here's a screenshot of the above from the latest Debian image written to my own SD card.

[texy]

Have you 'played around' with those allocations in GParted, as per Liam's tutorial?

I was just wondering why there are 3 unallocated area's? Would there be an advantage to having just 1 unallocated bulk area at the end?

Texy

[Chris.Rowland]

I've added a note to the wiki saying that in Windows only about 75MB of the SD card will be visible.

[SquatterMadras]

For reference, if you want to wipe the partitioned SD card completely then you will need to use a specific tool - Windows can't do it.

This one seemed to work fine for me : https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_3/