64GB Memory Card
#11
(04-20-2016, 06:00 AM)jl_678 Wrote: @tkaiser, thank you for Raspberry Pi memory card clarification.  I never understood why larger cards were problematic and now I do!

Well, in fact the description was too simplified since when you burn any 'normal' OS image to an SD card every sort of formatting done before is lost anyway (since the image contains already a new partition table and whole filesystems).

The instructions to use 'SD Formatter' (and directly after specialiced tools that allow to again format media larger 32 GB with FAT32) is only necessary when you want to use NOOBS on Rasperry Pi (a multi OS booting solution that will then be the first "OS" that's loaded by RPi's VideoCore GPU and let you then select specific OS installations to be chosen from).

But since the RPi foundation seems to their customers are dumb as hell and don't like to have too much support issues they simply tell everyone to specially format their cards even if it's plain useless since the next step (burning a regular image) will completely wipe out the partitioning and creation of a filesystem before.
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#12
@tkaiser, I have a potentially dumb question that I has hoping you could answer regarding memory cards.  When I write the .img, naturally all of the formatting and partitions come with it.  When I mount the card in Windows, the OS no longer sees the entire capacity.  This is normal, I know.  However, what if I want to "undo" the image write and restore the full capacity?

My use case for this question is pretty straightforward.  I forgot to "test" my card prior to writing the .img.  The img is now written, and I want to go back and test it.  H2Testw runs in Windows and so I need to revert the card back to a state where Windows can access the entire volume prior to running the test.  Make sense?
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#13
(04-20-2016, 07:13 AM)jl_678 Wrote: H2Testw runs in Windows and so I need to revert the card back to a state where Windows can access the entire volume prior to running the test.  Make sense?

Makes perfectly sense! Smile

But I have to admit that I'm one of the few IT guys who almost never deal with Windows so others might need to jump in to correct me. If you aren't able to format the card in Windows (right click in Explorer or starting diskmgmt.msc from start menu --> "run"?) then this might be one of the few real use cases for 'SD Formatter' since this has an option "Format size adjustment" which has to be set to ON so that the card retains it's 'original' size (at least what the card's controller tells the OS). The card should then be exFAT formatted and can be checked directly using H2testw.

Please report back to let others know or to aid creating the Pine64' quickstart guide that should contain or link on stuff like this.

BTW: This whole 'card checking' thing could also be done later when running in Linux (but of course it's better to do it before directly after purchase of any SD/TF card). 

The OS distro I contribute to -- Armbian, not available for Pine64 yet -- implements since a few weeks an 'armbianmonitor -c' mode that uses f3 to check the whole card when the SBC is already running. We do also a quick performance check since most if not all reports of 'Armbian being dog slow' are related to SD cards being way too slow regarding random I/O and +95% of all "Armbian doesn't boot or crashes continually" problems are related to either faulty SD cards or insufficient power supply.
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#14
@tkaiser - Thank you. I believe that the problem is that Windows does not understand the Linux partitioning scheme and so the OS just throws up its hands and ignores all but the first partition. Hence, the OS only sees the boot partition which is about 50MB. Any formatting or other similar activities only apply to the small partition. Not super helpful.....

Your idea of an SDCard reformat is a good one. I will explore that option unless someone else has an alternative suggestion. Of course, I like your idea of an CLI test even better. :-)

Finally, I do have access to a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. Is your app available for that? As an alternative, I could potentially mount the SDCard there with a USB reader and have it run the tests....
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#15
It won't help that much to try that with Raspbian since if you use any of the Linux images they're limited to fit on a 4GB or 8GB card so should have to expand the ext4 partition first. Better reformat using SD Formatter, check and then burn again.

And yes, armbianmonitor is just a shell script that can be used everywhere but needs some packages. But I don't know whether f3 for example is contained in raspberry.org repos (I only have a RPi 2 and don't let Raspbian run but Ubuntu since it's ARMv7 optimized -- so can't check)
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