[Bradford] Formatting micro SD for Raspberry Pi

[John Robert Hudson]

Hi Mike

With a 32GB card you should be using something like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=32768  

The DOS partition is presumably for /boot/efi and the Ext4 partitions for / and /home - no swap?

I would use Gparted for that.

John

On Monday, 15 March 2021 21:08:44 GMT Moanin via Bradford wrote:
> Evenin' All,
> 
> I have two 32gb micro SD cards, the second because the first one
> appeared to be corrupted. Once loaded with an OS, there were loads of
> 4gb sectors at the beginning and the OS update in the Pi showed not
> enough space left on the card. It needed a few more mb on the partition.
> But it wasn't the card. This has repeated itself with each attempt to
> fix matters.
> 
> Wiping the cards then checking with either lsblk or fdisk -l showed them
> as clean. So the formatting process came under suspicion and I was extra
> careful when formatting them. So the OS transfer (using dd) became the
> main suspect.
> 
> They wee cleaned using the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=8192"
> (earlier attempts were with bs=1M) and everything shows as 512 bytes
> from fdisk -l /dev/sdb. The result has not changed with the altering of
> the bs size parameter. It looks OK to me. Is it correct? As we would expect?
> 
> All of the above was using a CentOS 7 for Pi download but it may be
> corrupted (the cause) and no Pi version is available any more. So
> Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian has been renamed, still Debian based) is about
> to be downloaded.
> 
> Here's the question: what is the best format structure for one of these
> micro SDs prior to installing it? I really don't want to end up going
> round in more frustrating and time consuming circles.
> 
> The various online docs show a dos partition table with a 512M ext4
> primary partition and another ext4 primary partition for the remainder
> of the card. I've been using fdisk to do the formatting. Would Parted do
> a better job, or stick with fdisk?
> 
> If fdisk and dos table, is it safe to just hit o (create a new empty dos
> partition table) to begin with?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Mike
> 
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