SD image only partial copy

[wmsgva]

I have a fully working 8Gb Sandisk SD card which is configured with a specific username/password, different programmes I have written and allows me to use my Raspberry remotely from my PC with a USB Wifi dongle.

I tried to copy this card to another 8Gb Sandisk SD card in order to have a backup and because I want to install some other software on this card. I formatted the SD card with SDFormatter with format size adjustment on, then using Win32DiskImager wrote the image of the initial card I had saved to my PC (running under Windows 7) back to this SD card.

When I now try to boot by Raspberry with this new SD card, it does start properly, however, it only has the standard Pi account and doesn't activate my USD Wifi dongle (it's as if I had just installed a fresh copy of the Raspberry system on the card directly from the start-up option). I tried the operation several times, even using another imaging software (HDD Raw Copy Tool), but even with this other programme, the image I save from the original SD doesn't seem to copy properly to this new SD card.

Any ideas why this could be happening? Doesn't the Raspberry save all parameters to the SD card? This could explain the issue.

Any help is more than welcome.

[AlexTheStampede]

I might be wrong, but this sounds a bit like you end up making a copy of the wrong partition. As far as I know, the NOOBS one is FAT32, and the Linux one is EXT4 (maybe EXT3?) and Windows dosen't see the one you are interested into.

[FTrevorGowen]

@wmsgva
To clarify matters was your original SD card a NOOBS based one or created via a *.img file?
@AlexTheStampede
Your suggestion could be a possibility, depending upon the answer to the above.

For reference: There are screenshots of both NOOBS 1.2.1's partition structure and a typical Raspbian structure (on a linked page) at http://www.cpmspectrepi.webspace.virgin ... stall.html . In either case Windows will only "see" the first FAT partition.
Trev.