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Samsung UHS-I  Card SDHC  32GB

billabott

If I use Win7 to put a bootable Pi distribution on this card, is it still usable for Windows, cameras, and phones?  Has the formatting and partitioning of cards advanced so that they are truely multipurpose tools?

2. If the card is dedicated to Pi then does it also hold all the appllications, databases, movies, and pictures to be accessible via the Linux distro?

  • William

     

    1. Only if you reformat it. So not really a 'dual purpose' card.

    You need to use Win32DiskImager formatting tool described here http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

    to copy the distribution onto the card.

     

    2. Yes in essence the Card is the hard drive, but  you can access external storage (USB drive, memory stick, etc) for movies, etc.

    You can download and install more apps, in much the same way as you would download and install programs on a computer.

     

    Normally the card stays in, and is referenced/accessed just like the boot drive of a computer.

     

    Hope that helps

    Mark

  • Once setup for the Pi, the card will have two partitions, a small FAT partition that would be accessable from either linux or windows, and a linux filesystem on the second.

     

    The linux filesystem on most Pi distros is ext4 which windows can't access natively - in much the same way as linux can't (quite) handle windows NTFS partitions.

    There are however solutions to this problem, an application level ntfs driver, ntfs-3g, lets linux (and many other OS's) access windows partitions while there are several windows IFS drivers that allow access to linux extN partitions. One example is http://www.ext2fsd.com/

     

    Cameras often only support FAT partitions of some sort, if your phone is Android then being based on linux there's the possibility it can access the ext4 partition - assuming they've not removed the filesystems to save space.

     

    While the card itself is just a block storage medium and as such can be used in anything that has an appropriate interface, there's no truly universal partitioning method or filesystem.

     

    It could be tempting to think that FAT filesystems are well enough to be supported everywhere to be considered a universal filesystem, but it's not so simple.

    There are multiple FAT variants, all with their own issues, some completely incompatible. In adition, since MS started pursuing patent lawsuits you could find your OS or device using a version of fat that's lacking some abilities in order to avoid those patents.