Increase SD Card size

Hello,
can someone please outline the steps necessary to put RISC OS on a bigger SD card? I am using the latest Image from raspberrypi.org and want to use a 32 GB card. The image has 2 GB and about 1,6 GiB free.

I tried to use the SDCreate Tool, but it hasn’t an option for the Raspberry …

Thanks,
Egon

Putting RISC OS on a bigger card isn’t the problem. Of course you want the card to be available to the user too and that’s where it gets tricky. RISC OS doesn’t support partitions and the RPi needs the ROM to be on a FAT partition. Luckily there’s System Disc from Piccolo Systems. It’s very easy to use so I’m not going to bore you with that, just follow the instruction. AFAIK there isn’t any other way of doing it.

http://piccolosystems.com/disctools/systemdisc/systemdisc-tutorial

Hi Patric,

thanks for the hint!

Egon

SystemDisc is a great tool, but there is another way to make it:
1/ From RISC OS, copy everything on an ADFS USB Key. Don’t reboot.
2/ Remove the SD card put it on a Linux computer and backup everything that is inside the FAT partition.
3/ Put the card back to the Raspberry Pi. Use !HForm to format the card, but leave a few cylinders unused.
4/ Put it back on the Linux computer. Create a bootable DOS partition in the remaining space a the end of the disc (need some calculations). Copy all boot files.
5/ Put it back on the Raspberry Pi : copy all files form USB key to the SD card.
6/ Reboot.
7/ Enjoy!

One remark to David’s suggestion: To my understanding, while you of course get a working SD card, you lose the comfortable access to the boot files via “!Boot.Loader”. The “Loader” image file was carefully mapped (by hand at the time, IIRC) to match the sectors of the acutal boot partition. The System Disc tool takes account of that.

In a way… yes. But you can simply mount the dos partition with FAT32FS :)

Oh yes, I forgot. Right click on the SD card, right?

No, only from command line (with the rom I use). Perhapsit’s easier with new roms…

@David
“Your” way is not a “every time” stable one. I have try this for a long time. At the beginning all things are fine. After a long time to use often the MAP is corrupt.
SystemDisc is better. Thats the reason I have changed my Pandora-Distro from a two-partition-card to a SystemDisc one.

Normally there is no problem if you use cylinders to adjust the size of the ROS partition. You just need to leave some space between the two partitions… as the geometry is not exactly the same under Linux. One other solution is simply to use FAT32FS’s formatting tool, with a very big value for the parameter that fixes the space ‘not to be used’ placed at the beginning of the disc. It should works.

Of course, to avoid problems, never use another OS to put/read things on the FAT partition, after the initial setup.
It’s risky, especially under Windows.

I never use my cards with a other OS then RISC OS. The problem are not the partitions. No data lost but the Map or the file alocation table are corrupt. After the first error I have try any thinks and I become this error if I blow up the Map by copy many, many small files to the card. This error I have not if I use a SystemDisc card.

Probably an overlap between the two partitions. The main problem is disc geometry. It’s possible to choose it under Linux’s tools. Under Windows, it’s really a different problem. The OS tend to put things on free space.