Image sizes too big for SD card?

[KPhillisJr]

I know there was a plan afoot to make images that would fit all microSD cards in the given sizes (8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB). Maybe TL Lim can weigh in on this, if he isn't too busy responding to shipping queries.

I think the best solution is to use a 4GB ( as in 4,000,000,000 bytes)  base image that will automatically resize the data partition to fill the rest of the card during the first boot procedures. This offers the least amount of hassle to end users and developers alike.

That is exactly what the phoenixcard image does. Unfortunately the phoenixcard software is very unstable

Then why doesn't someone release an image that mimics what the phoenixcard image does, but instead is meant to be used with Win32 Disk Imager. All it really takes is a disk image from a 4gb card since most users will have 8gb or larger memory cards.

I think if it were that easy to do, TL Lim and the team would have done that from the start, rather than make all these DD variations that can confuse some people and not work with xx% of cards. If it were simply a case of making the smallest possible OS image then having a script fill out the microSD capacity upon first boot, I'd like to think they'd considered it but it turned out not to be possible, for whatever reason. 

It would definitely be preferable to have a single OS image though, rather than several that don't fit all microSD cards at the given capacities.

I believe that more than 80% of popular SDCards brands produced use the 1GB = 1 billion bytes ( 1,000,000,000 bytes) for sdcard sizes. A quick list of memory card vendors that generally use this definition for Memory Cards (Like SDCards, MicroSD Cards, etc) is as follows...

• AData
  
• SanDisk
  
• Kingston
  
• Patriot Memory
  
• Samsung
  
• Silicon Power
  

I also believe other vendors follow this, but i have not gone through the trouble of identifying all makers. Instead I went with the makers that users are most likely going to find when they head to a local store to find a memory card for the Pine64.