Hi all,
sorry, if this has been asked before. But,
I am now working with some Raspberries for around one year, and now I am confused about the following:
I can download NOOBS 1.4.x as a zip ball, and on a Linux machine, it is always easy to install the image on a brandnew SD card. These cards are always formatted with MS DOS VFAT32, and you just have to mount the relevant partition, cd to where it is mounted, and extract the whole content of the zip archive to it.
After that you can put the SD card into the Rapsberry, boot from it and run the setup procedure.
Not so, if you take a used SD card and format it to again have a VFAT32 filesystem on it ( I do something like "mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdb1" ).
A card which you have formatted this way can be used in any MP3 player or camera, but when trying to boot your Raspberry from this card, this attempt will always fail.
So, there seems to be something different. I just don't know, what exactly is missing when formatting a used card.
Does there have to be an "MS DOS master boot record" written to it?
I know that those cards can be purchased "ready-to-use", but I'd like to understand, what's going on here.
Thanks for info, best regards,
Markus