Raspberry Pi SD card capacity

[sam_p_lay]

Hi people,

I got a Raspberry Pi model B at Christmas (512MB version I think/hope) and I've tried burning a couple of images (Raspbian and RiscOS) from my Windows machine to the SD card via a USB SD card reader. Weird thing though - it's an 8GB SD card but when I've burned the images, Windows sees it as ~40MB and all the file sizes are a tiny fraction of what they should be.

The images boot fine so it's worked, but it means I can't use that extra capacity to dump a load of media on. I thought maybe the burning of the image is writing a file system onto the card or something and confusing Windows, but my Windows can't normally see ext3/4-formatted drives at all?

 

[Ijack]

The installation creates (at least) two partitions. A FAT32 one with the boot files on and one or more for the root filesystem (and possibly other filesystems). You can only see the boot partition from Windows, hence the 40 MB.

Why not transfer files using a USB stick or FTP?

 

[sam_p_lay]

Ah gotcha. I didn't even consider the possibility the SD card was being partitioned, but of course Linux relies on at least one additional partition. Silly Sam 🙂 And yeah, USB stick would be the other way to do it, but it seems really stupid that I can't use some of that capacity to drop media on alongside the OS.

 

[Ijack]

Well, there are ext3 drivers for Windows. Here's one: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/08/access-ext4-ext3-or-ext2-partitions-in.html

 

[sam_p_lay]

Thanks ijack - you've been helpful as always 🙂 These are stable right, no potential risk to my Windows installation?

 

[Ijack]

I'm afraid I can't talk from experience. I would probably copy the files to a USB key, move that to the Pi and copy from the key to the card. (Actually, I would probably FTP them, but not everyone has an FTP server available.)

 

[sam_p_lay]

Only servers I have access to are for work. Probably wouldn't be cool for me to use them for other things 🙂 Seems like a waste of data usage too. Maybe I'll just stick with sticks then. Cheers for your help anyway!

 

[sam_p_lay]

I just booted my Xubuntu install in the end, which can see both my NTFS storage drive and the SD card. I often miss the obvious solutions 🙂 Raspbian image write sets partition to 2GB as standard, but R-Pi config utility that runs at first boot gives the option to extend that to fill the entire card (which I did). Not sure where the swap space is coming from now, but it's working anyway 🙂 Thanks for your guidance Ijack.

 

[Ijack]

It's possible that the swap space is being provided by a file rather than a partition (as in Windows). It's less often used in Linux than a swap partition, particularly if you have more than one hard disk, but is a perfectly good way of managing swap space.