SD card formatting help

Hi all,

As a total noob to these modern advances in RIASC OS, I apologise in advance if this has already been covered somewhere, but after spending about 45 minutes trawling through forum posts I’ve decided it’s best to just ask :)

I am thinking about using an 8GB SDHC card for file storage on my Pi, and I wanted to check before I knacker anything up:

1. Can I format an SD card in RISC OS on the Pi by swapping oput my boot disc and inserting the card I want to format?

2. Using HForm, can I format the full disc or just a 2GB portion? I’m a little confused between bootable RISC OS Pi and just file storage with no bootable part – does the 2GB filecore restriction still apply?

Sorry again if this is thick :)

1/ Yes
2/ You can format the full card, but beware, to make it bootable you need to have a DOS partition. No problem here with 32 GB cards.

You may also want to take a look at SystemDisc from Piccolo Systems, which makes it very easy to create bootable RISC OS format SD cards of all sorts of sizes.

Thanks for the pointers above. And thanks to ROOL, got my RISC OS Pi and NutPi cards through about a week into the New Year, which was much quicker than I expected! :)

Returning to RPI after a long spell away from this forun because of illness, I find this thread very helpful. Can someone explain how, having created a newly formatted card as described here, one can copy a ‘mirror’ backup onto it.