Debian + Resizing Partition

[mc6...@gmail.com]

Hello

I recently flashed the BeagleBone Black 2GB eMMc card with Debian version 2014-05-15 and resized the partition using "fdisk". The BBB will crash after about 10 minutes of operation. I'd like to be able to boot via the eMMc and use the space on the SD Card as part of the eMMc partition. Does anyone have the steps documented as I may not be completing the resizing correctly. Carefull, I'm a newby and only speak English; not Linux!

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Mike

[Eric Fort]

Mike,

Not to worry, with practice your Linux will improve, just as your English has with practice and use.  In both cases we all start with zero competency as a complete newb.  As for the steps, I asked the same question not long ago here on this list.   here's a link to the question and answer in the list archive.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beagleboard/TKqSh4VFW_E

note, the pre rev c black has only 2GB of flash onboard which the image pretty well fills the Flash as is.

All the best with your venture into Linux, best OS out there!

Eric

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[Eric Fort]

Mike,

Just reread your question again.  Note, the onboard eMMc is pretty well filled by the standard image as was referenced by the following query to the list.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/beagleboard/Out$20of$20space$20immediately$20after$20flash/beagleboard/etpYcY6aHHc/ceNDm_15s8YJ

What you want to do in reality though is not so much resize the eMMC partition (though, I'd still use the provided tools to make as much space there as you can) as use the SD card to add space to your filesystem.

Start by understanding how filesystems under unix generally are built.  one has a number of volumes or partitions that are "mounted" in various places on the filesystem.  Where you choose to mount these volumes really depends upon where you need the space.  Normally you might mount a volume as /home if say you had a lot of users needing storage in their home directories or maybe you need more space for binaries so you'd mount a volume specifically for /bin or /sbin.  sometimes you may have seperate volumes mounted for /var  or others as well.  Unfortunately on the black you're somewhat constrained with only the emmc and a single SD slot and if you need more than the 2GB provides across multiple mounts it may be easier to just use a SD card of sufficent size as your root filesystem to begin with.  Generally most images put / and /boot on separate partitions.  from there with a big enough card everything except /boot goes on the / partition.  this makes things easy, especially for newcomers.  While you could conceivably come up with a complex and elaborate partitioning scheme spread across many volumes and mounts with a usb hub and 49,000 usb drives, 42, 890 network mounts, and a paper tape punch/reader for storage (not literally... I'm demonstrating absurdity by being absurd) it may just get a bit unwieldy.   The way I solved this problem was to spend about $20 on a 32GB microSD card which I boot from and use as my root filesystem.  I can then setup the eMMC onboard as 2GB of space to use for such things as my personal home directory or whatever else I feel like.  maybe the best option though is to install the absolute bare minimum small filesystem flash image found here http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black#BeagleBoneBlack-RootFileSystem%28smallflash%29 to eMMC and use an SD card as your "big" filesystem.  that way the black still has someting minimal that boots and when you need it, you can boot to your huge filesystem from SD card.

Eric

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 1:55 PM, <mc6...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Michael Coulton]

Eric

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to my earlier post. I will read the links and try again. FYI I've tried both flashing the eMMc and booting from the SD card (8GB in size). In both cases I have very little time to log into a terminal session. I have to SSH in via Putty. Ultimately I'd like to set up the BBB as an OpenVPN server and load in LXDE as a GUI. It sound like I should be able to do all on this from the SD card (space permitting).

Thanks again, Eric.

Michael

[Eric Fort]

Actually if you start with the flasher image found at   https://rcn-ee.net/deb/flasher/wheezy/ you ought to be able to easily fit what you want to do on the 2GB eMMC on the board without any extra card.  You'll even have bunches of space left!  The issue of the question you were asking is that with Unix/Linux type systems you have physical partitions which then make volumes, then filesystems, then get mounted somewhere on the filesystem tree.  this is how for instance your CD-ROM drive gets mounted and ends up in the directory tree as /mnt/cdrom.  Note, that with the beaglebone black which has 2GB on board (kinda like the hard disk on your desktop) and a slot for the removable SD card (kinda like the cd-rom drive) you have 2 physical media devices.  Because of this except for very special cases (RAID) one filesystem (partition on a physical device) will be mounted as / , another partition (generally but not necessarily on the same physical device) mounted as /boot, and other partitions/filesystems on other physical devices mounted elsewhere in the directory tree.  being as you have multiple physical devices they will be joined by partitioning them and mounting those partitions/filesystems where needed on the directory tree.

Eric