Questions tagged [sd-card]

SD (Secure Digital) cards and their associated SC/HC/XC technologies are the primary storage medium for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi Models A and B use SD Cards, and new models use Micro SD. SD cards are non-volatile flash memory.

Secure Digital (SD) cards are non-volatile memory cards, which were originally designed for portable devices, such as cameras, phones and tablets.

To minimise start-up costs, the Raspberry Pi utilises SD cards as its primary storage medium.

This decision does have its down sides, SD cards have comparatively slow read/write speeds and can have relatively short life spans.

Operating Systems for the Raspberry Pi are 'flashed' to the SD card, meaning that complex installation procedures can easily be skipped.

Working/Problem SD Cards

Not all SD Cards are compatible with the Raspberry Pi. The below links are a list of both working and problem SD Cards.

SDHC (SD High-Capacity) are 4 GB-32 GB.

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How can I reformat my SD card to use it normally again?

I wish to reformat my SD card to use normally again (it currently has one 78 MB FAT32 partition and one 3.9 GB Linux partition). How do I do this (on Windows/Mac/*nix)?
Tom Medley
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How can I determine when an SD card needs replacement?

Is there a way to estimate the lifetime of a SD card? If not, is there a utility I can use that monitors its integrity and reliability so I know when to use a new SD card?
ramblinjan
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Is my Raspberry Pi permanently damaging SD cards?

My Raspberry Pi was running fine for two months. Then some files in /usr/bin got corrupted and there were many errors on reboot. I tried to write a fresh image but dd would block and do nothing. sudo dd if=~/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img…
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How do I transfer my setup between SD cards?

I started out with a 2GB SD card, but I'm finding this a bit cosy, so I've bought a 16GB card to replace it. With a single Pi, can I transfer all my work between the cards, or do I need to start from scratch?
Tom Medley
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Running on read-only SD card

I have setup the Raspberry Pi to run XBMC, and I want it to boot up to always play a playlist and files on the SD card. I have turned off the Raspbmc automatic update. It still runs okay when I switch the SD card to the "lock" position. Now my…
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Raspberry Pi 3 micro SD card speed

With the new Raspberry Pi 3 out, is the speed of the bus still limited to around 20 MB a second? I am looking to purchase a micro SD card in it and I am not sure if I should spend the extra amount for a UHS-3 card that can get around 30+ MB/s…
Oscalation
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Creating a pre-prepared SD card image

For a project I'm working on I'd like to create a "stock" image based on Raspbian that I can install on many Pis. Ideally I'd like to be able to (on my computer) take the Raspbian image, apt-get some packages, edit some config and then create and…
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Can different raspberry pi models share SD cards?

Can I use a SD card from another Raspberry Pi (say a Raspberry Pi 2) on another raspberry pi model (say a Raspberry Pi Zero)? Note I am NOT referring to the same model! I am referring to DIFFERENT models.
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Is it true that I should not use a Micro-SD card with a SD size adapter?

I have read somewhere that I should not use a Micro-SD card (with an adapter) for the main storage & OS boot of my Raspberry Pi. Is it true? Why?
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Filesystem corruption on the SD card

If I use the Pi a bit, filesystem corruption soon appears. For instance, this file was changed to another one: $ ls -alt /etc/apt/apt.conf.d total 16 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Oct 2 22:18 50raspi -> ../init.d/ntp Or…
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Raspberry Pi 2 - Are 64GB UHS-I Class 1 SDXC cards supported?

Raspberry Pi 2 - Are 64GB UHS SDXC cards supported? I'm using a 64GB Hama UHS-I SDXC card formatted with the SD Card Formatter 4.0 with NOOBS 1.4 on it. It doesn't seem to want to boot. I have both green and red lights on all the time. Monitor…
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What speed of SD card is better?

I have to bought a SD card for my raspberry pi. It is better to have a huge writing speed (like 95 MB/s) or it is not so important and I can buy slower SD (30 MB/s or 45 MB/s) ?
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Can I clone my entire Raspberry Pi for deployment onto another Raspberry Pi?

I'm not sure if all the "how to backup your SD card" topics is what I'm asking for... but here we go :) Is there a way I can make a 100% clone of my Raspberry Pi and just deploy it onto another Raspberry Pi? So I have two exactly identical copies...…
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Where is the rest of my sd card?

I'm using a 4GB SD card, formatted from a Windows PC with the Debian image. Here's the output of df -h: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on tmpfs 94M 0 94M 0% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 156K …
Tom Medley
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I completely filled up my SD card - have I broken my Raspberry Pi?

I was downloading a file while connecting over ssh using wget. The download failed: Cannot write to `serviio-0.6.2-linux.tar.gz' (No space left on device). pi@raspberrypi:~$ Write failed: Connection reset by peer I can no longer communicate with…
Tom Medley
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