Managing Raspberry Pi images

Creating SD cards

There is a Windows program that some people use but I only use the Raspberry Pi imager, or sometimes Balena Etcher.

Copy IMG

Mick warns that pi-shrink is unreliable. Here it is all the same.

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-BackUp-and-Shrink-Your-Raspberry-Pi-Image/

I did this on Bellman and worked there I think. I think. Did I make notes?

sudo apt install dcfldd gparted

Building new images

pi-gen is what the Raspberry Pi folk use. See /boot/issue.txt on a standard image. For example,

Raspberry Pi reference 2023-12-11
Generated using pi-gen, https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen, 2acf7afcba7d11500313a7b93bb55a2aae20b2d6, stage2

Loading an SD card

Thing is, I could use Bellman but that does not help Mick since it's 800 miles away from him. So I am working with pi5 instead since he has access to his own inventory of Pi hardware.

I put the experimental svxlink image into a SanDisk card reader and popped it into a USB slot on pi5. The builtin card reader shows up in /dev/mmcblk0. It looks like this:

bwilson@pi5:~ $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7.48 GiB, 8035237888 bytes, 15693824 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x3c4a82fb

Device         Boot   Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1         8192  1056767  1048576  512M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      1056768 15693823 14637056    7G 83 Linux

The SD card in the card reader shows up in /dev/sda.

bwilson@pi5:~ $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 28.82 GiB, 30941380608 bytes, 60432384 sectors
Disk model: SDDR-B531 Reader
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x570b8731

Device     Boot  Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1         8192   532479   524288  256M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2       532480 60432383 59899904 28.6G 83 Linux

Since it's not mounted I could immediately make a copy but I'd be copying a 32GB card to an 8GB. Hardly likely. I need to add an NVME drive in a USB enclosure.

mkdir Documents
cd Documents
sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/RPI-Distro/pi-gen.git
# Install Docker engine, it's where pi-gen will run.
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER