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Improve support for expanding to use available space on sdcard #91

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jsavage opened this issue Aug 22, 2013 · 4 comments
Closed

Improve support for expanding to use available space on sdcard #91

jsavage opened this issue Aug 22, 2013 · 4 comments

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@jsavage
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jsavage commented Aug 22, 2013

Many noobs will want to migrate the contents to larger cards.
Currently if you install Noobs on say a 4GB card, you can later move the content to an 8GB card containing a 4GB partition using dd
Eg sudo dd if=/dev/sdd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
The next step --the resizing of the partitions is somewhat more difficult because the partitions involved is a logical one within a second extended partition. Automation would be beneficial here.

My suggestion is that as a minimum, on next boot, Noobs would offer to re-size the partitions to use the full extent of the sdcard. A more complete solution wrapping the formatting of the new card, the use of dd and the resizing would be ideal.

@lurch
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lurch commented Aug 22, 2013

Interesting idea, but IMHO it feels like this is outside the scope of what NOOBS is designed to do.
A better approach might be to backup your current OS to a standalone NOOBS install image, write a fresh version of NOOBS to your new (bigger) SD card, and then copy your custom NOOBS install image onto the new SD card before booting it for the first time. Have a look at what @mr-minifig said on #64 for a similar discussion about doing this - I think that if you modified the Pi-Noobs-Converter script to replace both occurrences of loop0p1 with loop0p5 and replaced both occurrences of loop0p2 with loop0p6 then it would then create a NOOBS install image from a "NOOBS SD card" rather than a "non-NOOBS SD card".

@jsavage
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jsavage commented Aug 22, 2013

Lurch - thanks for that suggestion. This is definitely an enhancement request that could be met in other ways and I only provided detail to illustrate the idea. However, since the partitioning scheme used is specific to NOOBS the solution is mainly of interest to those with using NOOBS. Perhaps all we need from NOOBSs is a mechanism for launching NOOBS specific addons such Pi-Noobs-Converter ? Such addons could then have their own lifecycle.

@lurch
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lurch commented Aug 22, 2013

For NOOBS to do that itself would require writing data back to the first partition, which NOOBS isn't allowed to do - see e.g. #89
So tools such as Pi-Noobs-Converter will always need to be run outside of the NOOBS environment on a separate Linux computer.

@jrobinson-uk
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Perhaps a simple backup/snapshot tool might more useful. Allowing users to
snapshot a noobs compatible image which could later be added to their
existing card (manually) or place on a larger card.
On 22 Aug 2013 12:00, "Andrew Scheller" notifications@github.com wrote:

For NOOBS to do that itself would require writing data back to the first
partition, which NOOBS isn't allowed to do - see e.g. #89#89
So tools such as Pi-Noobs-Converter will always need to be run outside of
the NOOBS environment on a separate Linux computer.


Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/91#issuecomment-23082201
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