Video guide to resize the partition to fill the SD card

[RaspberryPiBeginners]

Hey everyone,

You buy a 16GB SD card but when you put your Debian image on it you only have 2GB of space, this video will show you how to reclaim the rest of that unused space.

This video shows how to do it WITHOUT another Linux machine (gparted)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4VovMDnsIE

Hope this help.

[Joe Schmoe]

This is very good. I have a few comments, though:

1) Quick summary: The method is the same as that suggested by Jojopi - which is to delete the partition then immediately recreate it at full size. The trick is that neither operation (deleting or recreating) touches the data on disk, which remains intact. Note that the video says that it will destroy your data and that you should back it up first, but that's not really true. It only destroys your data if you make a mistake. That's not, of course, to say that backing it up isn't a good idea, but it is almost certainly not necessary.

2) Watching the video, one cannot help but get the feeling that, although cool and definitely hacker-ish, this shouldn't be necessary. One way or another, the process should be somehow done "at the factory". I understand the reasons why it can't (at least at the current level of technology - but see later).

3) Note to whoever packages up the Debian image releases at the Foundation: Suggest reversing the order of the 2nd and 3rd partitions on the SD card - that is, putting the swap partition before the main Linux partition. Then the process of resizing would not require mucking with the swap partition.

4) As noted earlier, the fact that this procedure is even necessary leaves me uneasy. The usual Unix way of doing this sort of thing is to create a new partition, mount it, and use it - that is, it shouldn't be necessary to resize existing partitions. But the cold, hard fact is that what you need is more space under /usr and there is no simple way to "make it so". But it occurs to me that UnionFS could be the solution. If we could get UnionFS working on the Pi, then we could just create a new partition, and union that to / and be done with all of this. Could that be done? Or something similar?

[RaspberryPiBeginners]

Thanks for your input, thinking about it you won’t lose your data. I would edit and re-upload if youtube allowed me to “switch out” a video if you know what I mean?

I also get the feeling that in future releases this won’t be necessary but for people right now it's how I managed to get around the problem, thanks for the feedback

[mrbill]

Nice video - but perhaps a bit scary for a newbie. Should this not all be automated into a script - potentially even running automatically on first boot of the Debian image?

[RaspberryPiBeginners]

Nice video - but perhaps a bit scary for a newbie. Should this not all be automated into a script - potentially even running automatically on first boot of the Debian image?

Give it a month and the next Debian image will be out and this video will most lilly be pointless.

It might be a bit scary but i've not missed any steps out so as long as they follow it to the letter it will work.

Thanks for watching, feed back welcome....if only i had the time to make this into a script.