Monday, 11 February 2013 10:39
Resizing SD card partitions for Raspberry Pi
If you download the Raspbian image from Raspberry Pi official homepage and write it to the SD card, the SD card partition is fixed to 2GB, meaning that only 2GB is accessible no matter how big your SD card are. You must manually re-size the SD card partition in order to increase the available storage capacity.
There are few ways to re-size SD card partition. The most simple way is to bring up the Raspi-config menu and choose expand_rootfs, this will make the partition which is same size with SD card.
In some instances, it is necessary to use other way to re-size SD card partition. For example, I only require 4GB space from my 8GB SD card. The reason of not using the full size from SD card is bigger partition will have bigger file size during backup.
Gparted is a great software that runs on Linux, it come with graphical user interface. To run Gparted on Ms Windows, VirtualBox must be used.
There are 3 different way to run Gparted.
- Boot from CD/DVD
- Boot from USB thumb drive
- Runnig Gparted from VirtualBox
Boot from CD/DVD
- Download Gparted, you should download the stable GParted Live CD/USB/HD/PXE Bootable Image
- Launch Nero Burning ROM (any CD/DVD burning tools should work)
- Select Recorder>Burn Image as shown in figure below
- Choose the downloaded Gparted ISO image file
- Click on Burn button to start burning CD
- Restart computer and select Boot from CD/DVD (You may need to change the CMOS settings for some older computer)
Boot from USB thumb drive
- Download Gparted ISO file
- Download Tuxboot, a utility to create bootable Live USB drive
- Launch Tuxboot
- Select Gparted ISO image from Pre Downloaded
- Choose the correct Drive as shown in figure below
- Click OK button to start writing Gparted to thumb drive
- Restart computer and select Boot from USB during boot up (you may want to change your CMOS settings for some computer)
- Gparted should start
Running Gparted from VirtualBox
- Download and Install VirtualBox
- Launch VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine (VM)
- Configure VirtualBox Storage as shown in figure below
Enable USB 2.0 as shown in figure below, it is necessary to add Multi-Card USB device to the USB Device Filters. VirtualBox will mount the card reader automatically.
- Start virtual machine, Gparted should starting soon
Re-size the SD card partition
- You should see the following following screen as soon as Gparted started
- Follow steps from picture below to start resizing
- Enter new size for the SD card partition
- Click on Resize/Move button when done
Published in
Blog
Tagged under
