Image sizes too big for SD card?

[gtpboy]

Same here it was driving me crazy. I thought my card capacity magically shrunk after a reformat then after multiple re-formats and wiping the card clean multiple times I finally realized it was the images problem. went back to the 20160505 32GB image and it burns just fine to my 32GB Samsung EVO card. I will be trying the 2016711 64GB Image on another 64GB card. Not sure, can I write the 16GB Image to my 32GB card?

[Pepe]

You can, but then you need to resize it

[montero65]

I don't know anything about resizing, unless the win32 imager took care of that, but I did put the 32GB on my 64GB card, and it's working fine. I'd rather have the right size image though so the extra storage space is actually available.

[gtpboy]

Same thing is happening with the rooted 64GB DD image, says it's to big for my card. Are other people having this problem? I didn't have this problem with the last 2 releases.

[jimwrey]

I imagine I'm not the only person who has encountered this, but I recently picked up a few microSD cards that I wanted to use with the Pine.  The problem I'm having is when I try to use the DD images for a 32GB card, it says that the image is too big, not enough sectors available (using Win32DiskImager).

I purchased three of the same card, SanDisk Ultra 32GB class 10, UHS-1.  All three show the exact same size of 29.8GB.  I know companies do the 1000 instead of 1024 thing for how they calculate GB, and if you do that for KB, MB, and GB, you're looking at 29.8GB actual, so that makes sense.

But I would think the image for a 32Gb card should fit on a "32GB" card.  Is anyone else having this same issue?  Am I missing something?  Do I need to format the cards first in a different way?  I tried to format, I think it was exFAT32.  I could also select sector size (it was at 512).  What are the correct settings to format the card to?  Or, should I use the 16GB image on the 32Gb card in order to  have some storage space available?  Thanks for the help.

Using Win32 DiskImager and had the same problem here.  "Not enough room ... not enough sectors"

Using SanDisk 32 GB class 10 UHS-1 card.


Suggestions?

[x1800MODMY360x]

I had the same problem flashing a LCD android image to a 16gb sd card.

But I got it to burn/flash/etc to it since i mess with pc and stuff.

The problem with win32disk is that it flash the images using the formatted partition instead of the raw disk, which is smaller that the total size.

The fix I did was I shrunk the image on my computer using a hex editor software near the end of the image about I think deleted 500 MB of zero data to make the image fit the sd card.

[KPhillisJr]

Hey

This has been already discussed on the forum - I tried finding the link for you but couldn't find it. I'm not an expert BUT it appears that some manufacturers use a GB as exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes while an actual GB has 1,073,741,824 bytes. So a 16GB case would be = 14.9 GB
[someone correct me if I am wrong]

Without getting any further into this I can say that I've had no issues with Samsung SD cards, but did encounter issues with other manufacturers.

This is exactly what is happening. In reality most storage Makers use the following units to size their products...

• 1 terabyte (TB)  = 1000 gigabytes (GB)
  
• 1 gigabyte (GB) = 1000 megabytes ( MB)
  
• 1 megabyte (MB) = 10000 kilobytes (kB)
  
• 1 kilobyte(kb) = 1000 bytes
  

The issue is that the dd image uses the binary representation which has the following conversion table:

• 1 tebibyte (TiB) = 1024 gibibyte (GiB) = about 1099 gigabytes
  
• 1 gibibyte (GiB) = 1024 mebibyte (MiB) = about 1073 megabytes
  
• 1 mebibyte( MiB) = 1024 kibibyte  (KiB ) = about 1048 kilobytes
  
• 1 kibibyte (KiB) = 1024 bytes
  

Using this table, You can see that 99% of the SDCards will probably fail to write disk images under windows since most manufactures use the decimal representation of disk sizes. This means the following sizes will always hold true.

• 8 GiB SDCard image will require approximately 8.6 GB sdcards
  
• 8 GB SDCards will always hold at least 7.45 GiB
  
• 16 GiB SDCards will require at approximately 17.2 GB SDCards
  
• 16 GB SDCards hold about 14.9 GiB.
  
• 32 GiB SDCards Images require about 34.5 GB SDCards
  
• 32 GB SDCards Images require about 29.8 GiB SDCards
  
• 64 GiB SDCard Images require about 68.72 GB SDCards
  
• 64 GB SDCard Images require about 59.6 GiB SDCards.
  

I believe a practical solution would be to correct the actual SDCard Image sizes to the above Bolded lines.

[User 4127]

I was getting the same problem. Ended up using the phoenix card image and though it failed the first 15 times (not kidding) it ended up working on the 16th.

[KPhillisJr]

Hey

This has been already discussed on the forum - I tried finding the link for you but couldn't find it. I'm not an expert BUT it appears that some manufacturers use a GB as exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes while an actual GB has 1,073,741,824 bytes. So a 16GB case would be = 14.9 GB
[someone correct me if I am wrong]

Without getting any further into this I can say that I've had no issues with Samsung SD cards, but did encounter issues with other manufacturers.

I think the problem is with numerous companies ( including Microsoft ) blatantly failing to properly follow specifications. I can easily identify more than 3 respected sources that clearly state that 1 Gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes.

• January 1999 -  International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) specification number 60027 (aka IEC 27 ) - Wikipedia
  
• National Institute of Standards and Technology - International System of Units - Prefixes for binary Multiples
  
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has specified this since around 2003. To be exact look at specification of IEEE 1541-2002
  
• International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) has defined since October 20th, 1960 the metric prefixes which Control Kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte,  etc. For an idea on the prefixes you can use the Metric Prefix page on wikipedia.
  

[montero65]

So, lots of comments, but not much help in fixing the problem. I was originally hoping I could get a quick answer of "you need to format the card with this sector size and it will be good" or something simple.

To be honest, I do keep forgetting to try the formatting that Don suggested when I get home, and never remember to bring a card to work to try out. Has anyone tried what Don suggested, using the SD formatter program? Did it work out?

ModMy360, can you maybe share some more detail on how you tweaked the image, for those of us that don't know how to do what you said with the hex editor? Is it difficult to do? Is it something that can be done on a PC? I don't have a Linux machine (or know how to use Linux), and am pretty new to this whole sphere of knowledge.

Seems like the best fix would be if the images posted to the wiki by Pine were to be tweaked by Pine to maybe solve this issue for everyone, as KPhillis pointed out. Or even if they can remove the 500MB of zero data, like ModMy360 said. It seems many of us want to use the DD images over PhoenixCard, but are left with the options of putting a smaller image on our card, or using PhoenixCard. I thought I even read a post by TL saying he tries to make sure the images fit on the card sizes, but it seems like maybe that's hit or miss in the community.