On Thu, 30 Sep 2021 10:26:23 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Sep 2021 13:54:46 +0200, "R.Wieser" <add...@not.available>
> declaimed the following:
>
>
>>Hence my idea to make the NOOBS installation think the micro-SD card is
>>actually smaller than it is ...
>>
>>
> I don't think the Raspberry-Pi foundation even distributes NOOBS
format
> any more. The closest is the "Raspberry-Pi Imager" -- which runs on
> Windows/Macs (and strangely, listed for Ubuntu even though R-Pi OS is
> based on Debian).
>
> As I understand it, this program does a network download of the
> selected OS and writes just it to an SD card. One does not have the
> NOOBS overhead of having a couple of different OS on the card (along
> with the network install OS). {the imager installer is just 20MB for
> Windows machines -- so it obviously can not contain a 3GB OS image
> itself}
>
> [Trimmed]
> C:\Users\Wulfraed>dir e:\MicroSupport\RPI3_4
> Directory of e:\MicroSupport\RPI3_4
>
> 03/28/2021 06:28 PM 3,007,638,235
> 2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf-full.zip
>
> 06/23/2021 06:27 PM 3,005,999,855
> 2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-full.zip
>
> 09/18/2021 12:29 PM 19,772,672 imager_1.6.2.exe
>
> 10/13/2020 03:09 PM 2,441,652,758 NOOBS_v3_5_0.zip
>
>>Do you have a bit more info about that ? I would not mind having the
>>NOOBS pre-boot "press shift to reinstall" stuff removed.
>
> Not using an out-of-date NOOBS image might be an option...
>
https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/
> The last NOOBS image was 3.5.0, and I show a download date a year ago.
> In the meantime, there have been at least TWO RaspiOS images made
> available. (See above listing)
>
> Still won't do anything for the partition size filling the SD
card --
> when different brands of cards may reserve different amounts of blocks
> for bad-block remapping.
You'll need a USB connected SD card reader. Put a new SD card in it and
connect it to the RPi.
Use the 'parted' command-line to format the new SD card with two
partitions:
- partition no 1: a 1 GB fat32 partition with its boot flag set
- partition no 2: an ext4 partition occupying the rest of the card
Use the 'dd' utility to copy /dev/mmcblk0p1 into the first partition and
/dev/root into the second partition.
Now the RPi should boot from the new card.
Yes, I know that the RPi OS installation is currently only 50 MB, but
disk space is cheap these days and the process of upgrading the OS will
require the boot partition to be at least twice the size of the installed
operation system, because at one point in the upgrade process both the
old and new versions are on the partition at the same time.
If you're using a tiny SD card, you can make the boot partition somewhat
smaller, but don't make it less than 200GB or an upgrade may fail. Don't
ask how I know this...
Lastly, if you're not already using 'apt' to do regular system upgrades
over the 'net, start using it: its faster than messing round with Noobs
and easy once you've done it the first time. Just run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo reboot
And, of course you can always save time and typing by putting that
command sequence in a shell script and running that.
I always make a system backup before doing an upgrade but ymmv.
--
--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org