Expanding root partition on SD card - when raspi-config doesn't recognise SD card format.....

On 04/10/2020 01:56 pm, NY wrote:


One way that gets over the need to expand it would be to make a  
filesystem on /dev/mmcblk0p3 and then use that as /home.
Mount the new filesystem to /mnt and then rsync -av /home/ /mnt/
Unmount and mount the new filesystem on /home to check.
Then you can unmount and remove the old /home/* and remount the new one  
on /home/

Alternatively (assuming you have the full desktop) install gparted and  
use that to remove mmcblk0p3 and expand mmcblk0p2 to the fullest extent.

You can probably do it with parted from the command line - but I've  
never tried.

And then remember to never ever use Noobs again.

On 04/10/2020 02:41 pm, A. Dumas wrote:


I wouldn't assume noobs was the problem, it seems more likely it was the  
use of a 16GB card in the first place.
However, I would agree that noobs is a solution looking for a problem.

On 04/10/2020 14:50, Chris Elvidge wrote:


NOOBS is OK to play with, being able to install lots of OS's and find  
the one you like, but then you are only going to use one OS going  
forward, you need to ditch it and just use a single OS install.

The problem with NOOBS is there are lots of partitions, more than the 4  
which can be marked as physical, so it needs to use logical partitions.  
When you copy it to a new card, instead of the OS being the last  
physical partition which can easily be expanded by raspi-config to the  
size of a new card, its trapped within a logical partition and my have  
others after it.

You don't have to start again from scratch, it is possible to extract  
just your OS's boot partition and root partition, but its not straight  
forward, and if you haven't messed with partition tables before, it can  
be a bit daunting.

I'll only give a brief outline of what to do, as without I don't NOOBS  
card to refer to, and it was a long time since I had to do it.

1) Backup up the NOOBs card, and do this on the copy on the larger card
2) Boot in to the OS you want to use
3) Use df and note the partition numbers of /boot and / (root)
4) Put the card a different Linux machine and unmount all partitions
5) Using parted note the start and end of the two partitions above
6) You will have to delete all partitions on the card to get rid
    of the logical partitions
7) Recreate the partitions noted as physical partitions
8) Using gParted move boot to start 4M in to the card, with size 256M
    and root after boot taking up the rest of the card

---druck

On 05/10/2020 11:21 am, druck wrote:


Sorry for my earlier advice, then. Never used NOOBs so didn't know it  
had *many* partitions.

following:


    On the Beagleboard forums, Win32 Disk Imager has been deprecated as a
writing tool -- the preference seems to be for Balena Etcher. However,
Win32 Disk Imager would still be needed to read a card and make an image.



    The R-Pi foundation seems to create lots of odd partitions when using
NOOBS, while Expand Filesystem likely expect to see nothing past the root
file system. NOOBS does the expansion (and likely partitioning) from the
FAT-only system before putting an OS into the EXTn partition.

pi@rpi3bplus-1:~$ ls -l /dev/mmc*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 0 Oct  1 01:33 /dev/mmcblk0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 1 Oct  1 01:33 /dev/mmcblk0p1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 2 Oct  1 01:33 /dev/mmcblk0p2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 5 Oct  1 01:33 /dev/mmcblk0p5
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 6 Oct  1 01:33 /dev/mmcblk0p6
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 7 Oct  1 01:33 /dev/mmcblk0p7
pi@rpi3bplus-1:~$

pi@rpi3bplus-1:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       12028584 8651864   2742660  76% /
devtmpfs          440756       0    440756   0% /dev
tmpfs             474036       0    474036   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs             474036    6368    467668   2% /run
tmpfs               5120       4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             474036       0    474036   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p6    258094   54604    203490  22% /boot
tmpfs              94804       0     94804   0% /run/user/1000

    So partition 6 is /boot, but what are the others? And why did it skip
partitions 3 and 4?



    No tool that I know of -- since they copy the partition table as-is.

    I've gotten to the point of creating a shell script that installs are
my standard packages, and after creating a new card using NOOBS I run that
script.

pi@rpi3bplus-1:~$ cat RPi-config.sh
#! /bin/sh
#all RPi
sudo apt-get install -y vim-gtk3 gnat gnat-gps gfortran python3-flask
python3-flask-*
sudo apt-get install -y ncurses ncurses-devel ncurses-base
sudo apt-get install -y nginx-full gunicorn3 python3-gunicorn
python3-pastedeploy python3-setproctitle fcgiwrap
sudo apt-get -y install scratch3
sudo apt-get -y remove scratch mu-editor
sudo pip3 install RPI.GPIO
sudo pip3 install adafruit-blinka

#RPi 4 only
#sudo apt-get install -y mariadb-server mariadb-client mycli dbconfig-mysql
python3-mysqldb
#sudo apt-cache search libncursesada*

sudo apt -y autoremove
pi@rpi3bplus-1:~$


    In this aspect, the Beaglebone is simpler --  

debian@beaglebone:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev              218936       0    218936   0% /dev
tmpfs              49500    1576     47924   4% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p1   7572696 2118140   5095796  30% /
tmpfs             247480       0    247480   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs               5120       4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             247480       0    247480   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs              49496       0     49496   0% /run/user/1000
debian@beaglebone:~$ ls -l /dev/mmc*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179,  0 Oct  4 10:01 /dev/mmcblk0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179,  1 Oct  4 10:01 /dev/mmcblk0p1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179,  8 Oct  4 10:23 /dev/mmcblk1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 16 Oct  4 10:23 /dev/mmcblk1boot0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 24 Oct  4 10:23 /dev/mmcblk1boot1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179,  9 Oct  4 10:23 /dev/mmcblk1p1
crw------- 1 root root 245,  0 Oct  4 10:23 /dev/mmcblk1rpmb
debian@beaglebone:~$

    Only one partition on the SD card; the mmcblk1 device is the on-board
eMMC. Their install comes with a standard script to "grow" the partition
and it handles single or dual partition (older OS images used a small FAT
partition -- newer ones emulate that so Windows can see the "getting
started" help pages).