Limiting the capacity of SD cards for the pi

Bob Latham · 2023-09-17T08:58:13+00:00

Hi,I build images for projects on 4GB cards so that I can save acompleted image without using too much disc space. My problem comeswhen I try to burn a new card from the saved image. Often it will notfit because there are small differences in the size of the cards.Does anyone know of a way to reduce the capacity of an SD card sothat I can make a 4GB card maybe 3.5GB which would mean all cardscould easily manage it and reduce the size of the save image.Thanks.Bob.

Sep 17, 2023 Last reply: 2 years ago 204 Replies

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Martin Gregorie 2 years ago

I've looked at nano don't like it. If you've got a Linux box with a colour graphical screen of at least, say 1200 x 800 or thereabouts, you could do a lot worse than try the 'gedit' text editor: its fast, has a decent toolbox of editing tools and can edit multiple files at once. Full details are here:

formatting link

Apart from that, I think its worth knowing 'vi'. You'll probably hate it at first, but its fast, and runs on any Linux system including those without any 'arrow keys' or working graphical display.

Vi is almost guaranteed to be part of every Linux distribution, Its man page is pretty readable too. And there's version of it, vim, thats been ported to Windows.

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56g.1173 2 years ago

Even one byte diff in card size really IS a problem. You can't use 'dd' if the dest card is smaller. I recently had this prob with cards by the same maker, just slightly different models. 32gb is "approximate" size, doesn't mean *exactly* the same size.

To shrink a PARTITION, the super-crude way is to yank the card out of the Pi and plug it into another Linux PC ... and use 'gparted'. Hard to do that on a card/partition that's "live" alas, hence the need to remove it and use another machine.

Once shrunk, as the boot/grub stuff is still there, it will USUALLY boot ok ... but run 'update-grub' immediately just to keep things that way.

I've taken to sizing partitions to leave a little bit of unused space at the end. In THEORY you can then use 'dd' and when it runs out of space on the smaller card, well, it was copying naught but zeros anyhow, nothing 'system'.

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The Natural Philosopher 2 years ago

<stuff>

FFS this is three months old! WE solved it months ago.

-- Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead. They must face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.

Ayn Rand.

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