SD card image - RPi

Hi All,

Could someone someone refresh my memory as to the exact steps needed to write a new SD card for the Raspberry Pi. No doubt I’ve overlooked something obvious. . . I thought it would be a case of downloading the RC15 SD card image, writing it to a 2GB SD Card in SCSI::0 using SDCreate and popping the card into my other Raspberry Pi and booting up.

However it reports "Machine startup has not completed successfully: ‘File ’&.!Boot’ not found’
(as though it doesn’t recognise or can’t access the filecore ADFS partition).

As I say must be something obvious I’m missing but I don’t know what!

Thanks :)

exact steps needed to write a new SD card for the Raspberry Pi.

I think the answer has always been to use another platform. In linux dd if=imagefilename of=/dev/sdb (or whereever the card is mounted.)I’m not sure about SDCreate, but I tried the RISC OS SCSI ops to do a raw copy, but it filters what it is writing and when it encounters ABCD it will write DEFG instead. I cant recall the values exactly but it didn’t appear to be position dependant. You have to compare it to the dd output to see the difference, because if you use RISC OS to read it back it converts the bytes back again as if nothing had happened. I haven’t looked into it any further than finding it can’t be used.

thanks Ronald, dd if=riscos-2017-04-13-RC15.img of=/dev/sdd worked for me on a Linux machine, shame it can’t be done natively on RISC OS.

shame it can’t be done natively on RISC OS.

I’m not sure where in the Disc Ops it happens, but fixing it would make all the existing RISC OS filing systems unreadable I guess. It would need a customised version of the OS routines to make a true raw write I think. There is talk of introducing a new filing system which would hopefully be more standardised, this would give a clean break. I noticed there are bounties announced for USB and Networking that is closer to NetBSD,

I’m not sure about SDCreate, but I tried the RISC OS SCSI ops to do a raw copy, but it filters what it is writing and when it encounters ABCD it will write DEFG instead.

This sounds extremely strange. The whole USB mass storage subsystem relies on SCSI_Op to work correctly. Could you post which calls you used?

It is strange indeed. Fat32fs also uses the SCSI Sector ops for reading and writing – if there was a problem with these calls we’d know by now.

It would need a customised version of the OS routines to make a true raw write I think.

Eh? On my RiscPC back around Y2K I hooked two drives to my Simtec IDE card and made a clone of a FAT16 filesystem by simply stepping through the entire disc reading sectors from one disc and writing them to the other. Worked, PC booted the clone, started Win95, no problems.

Surely that wouldn’t have been possible if raw ops didn’t work?

Ditto mounting any filesystem that isn’t FileCore native, like…DOSFS?

Surely that wouldn‘t have been possible if raw ops didn‘t work?

I suggest you compare the write of an sd card using RISC OS to a write done by (linux) dd if you want to see what happens. Dont read it back with RISC OS or you wont see the difference. It is a while since I tried (and failed) and I cant help you with the why. It was writing correctly all except the occasional instances of a 2-3 byte pattern.
It is taken me 30minutes just to post this reply, Netsurf would not hold up a connection/login so I have had to start a linux machine.

If you can get to a star prompt use *cat and *status to check what filing system and drive it is booting from and if the opt is set.

It is taken me 30minutes just to post this reply, Netsurf would not hold up a connection/login so I have had to start a linux machine.

Don’t want to sound patronising, but are you sure your power is okay? Remember, it doesn’t matter if your PSU can output 2A, that’s probably not how much makes it to your Pi itself – everything that is connected will consume power.

Two observations of my own – when my power was inadequate, it showed up as filesystem corruption. Everything seemed fine otherwise, no crashes, nothing other than data being written obviously incorrectly.
And as for NetSurf, I don’t use it much, but when programming or whatever I have DigitalCD streaming radio and it often runs for hours without problems (via Vonets WiFi thingy).

Don’t want to sound patronising, but are you sure your power is okay?

I’m using my Iyonix not a Pi, I have been using an external 10Amp 12v psu and a pico DC-DC atx plug successfully for a year or so now. I think the possible area of concern on the Iyonix is the intel on board networking, these can be replaced with the PCI card equivalent. In linux you can look at syslog to get an idea what a holdup is caused by, The only thing I can try on the Iyonix, is pinging the router (which usually works OK) or try a different website.
My impression over the years though, is that RISC OS networking does not recover very well from poor (maybe dancing around) internet connections. I had problems with downloading files (not lately), and yet if I downloaded through a proxy on a linux machine it cured it straight away.
I am using OpenWRT on a Nexx 3020H and a Mobile phone dongle at the moment, not a fast setup, and combined with the ROOl site being elusive (this morning would not open at all for 5 minutes) not to mention other people having login problems.
I might look at setting up proxy on the Nexx gateway sometime.

It is a must to use StrongEd to write a reply, success rate is improved significantly by doing the login/save message as quickly as possible, and of course you dont lose anything if it fails.
You probably wont see these problems so much if you have strong internet, and ‘another platform’.
Edit: once again, timeout was reached trying to post to the forum, and I’ve moved this over to linux to send.
Rick, I changed your apostrophe in Don’t so that it doesn’t display the unknown unicode character.

I tried myself, and there is indeed a problem with writing (or maybe even extracting from the ZIP?) the RC15 image with SDCreate on a RISC OS machine (I used an RPi 2 with a rather old ROM) just as Chris describes. The result is booting RISC OS OK, but then cannot find the filecore FS on the card – SDFS only mounts the FAT part OK, but no Filecore FS in sight.

Writing the image with Win32DiskImager results in a working system. I will try to investigate.

I downloaded the RC15 SD card image from ROOL, transferred it to a Windows XP notebook and used WinDiscImager to put it on a 64Gb SD-card. It runs fine on an Rpi3. But when I select Free from the SDFS::0 icon’s menu on the iconbar it evidently thinks there is only 2Gb available. I also have RC14 running on an Rpi2 and that shows 54Gb free out of 58Gb. So what have I done wrong?

That’s normal; the image is of a 2GB card so that’s what you get. You need to use something like SystemDisc to use the entire card.