Configuration Hacks - Raspberry Pi Hacks - page 3

You're looking for something like /dev/sdd or /dev/mmcblk0 with the size of your SD
card. To format, run the mkdosfs command, replacing /dev/mmcblk0 with the location
of your card:

$ mkdosfs -I -F32 /dev/mmcblk0

This will make a single FAT formatted partition on the SD card. To be honest, it really
doesn't matter very much how you format or partition the SD card in most cases,
because when installing any of the system images for Raspberry Pi OS distributions
that include partitions (such as Pidora or Raspbian), the partition table on the SD card
will be completely overwritten by the installed OS image. The exception to that is
NOOBS. By partitioning the disk with a single FAT partition, it is possible to install
NOOBS to the SD card by simply copying the NOOBS files directly onto the SD card.

If you find that you have, say, an 8 GB card, and your computer thinks it's only 2 GB,
you need to “grow” it to match. Or you might have found that your card's device name
ends in p1 (followed by p2 and so forth):

/dev/mmcblk0p2 1.6G 1.5G 54M 97% /run/media/wwatson/rootfs
/dev/mmcblk0p1 50M 18M 33M 35% /run/media/wwatson/boot

This means your card is partitioned, and you should get down to one partition before
formatting. Adjusting partitions and their sizes is most easily accomplished with a GUI
tool called Gparted , a visual version of the command-line parted .

Mount the SD Card

HACK 02

While you can certainly access the files on the Raspberry Pi directly from
within a running instance, mounting the SD card on a separate computer
with an SD card reader makes many tasks (such as adding or editing
files) easier.

The Raspberry Pi is a standalone Linux computer, but it really helps to have another
computer on hand. In some cases, it might even be necessary. Fortunately, many
computers now come with SD card readers built in, and if yours didn't, they're inex-
pensive and easy to come by. So, even if you buy your SD cards preloaded, you should
probably still have an SD card reader and a second computer for interacting with your
Raspberry Pi build.

Most Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi create at least two partitions on the SD
card. The first partition is always /boot , because the Raspberry Pi GPU reads its firm-
ware from the beginning of the SD card. The second partition is usually / (also known
as the root partition ).