SD card

[SirElderaf]

I'm planning to order my Raspverry at the end of the month, but I have a single question before I do so. If I get it completely set up, If I putmy sd card back into my laptop can I put files onto it for use with the raspberry?

[rickseiden]

Yes and no. The SD card will have two partitions. One of them will be FAT, and your Windows laptop will be able to read it just fine. The other will be ext4 (I think), which is Linux only for the most part, and your laptop won't be able to read or write to that partition. The FAT system is fairly small, so it's not really a good place to read and write files. Your best bet will be flash drives, I think.

[tonyhughes]

If your laptop and your Pi are networked (either via wifi to an access point, or plugged in), then moving files back and forth becomes trivial, with the Pi able to be left running while you do so.

We can help further with this line, if thats the case.

[SirElderaf]

It will not be networked unfortunetly. But on the topic of the FAT partition, How big would that be on a 16gb (micro sd in adapter)?.

[tonyhughes]

Heres the output from

Code: Select all

df -Bm

on a Raspberry Pi Model B with 16GB Class 10 Sandisk, running Decembers Raspbian Wheezy:

Code: Select all

Filesystem     1M-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs            14969M 2644M    11566M  19% /
/dev/root         14969M 2644M    11566M  19% /
devtmpfs            235M    0M      235M   0% /dev
tmpfs                49M    1M       49M   1% /run
tmpfs                 5M    0M        5M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs                98M    1M       98M   1% /run/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p1       56M   21M       36M  37% /boot

The last line is the FAT partition. 36MB free space. And I would be nervous about filling it (because I don't know what happens if it runs out if space).

Far better off using a USB flash drive to move files back and forth.

[Irre]

If you use an external USB-disk for the root file system, the SD-card can be very small and it is not nescessary to partition it. (But you must populate the SD-card and USB-disk with files and change
/etc/fstab and kernel parameter to root=/dev/sda1, I did this from another linux-system.)