SD Card Reader for Raspberry Pi - DYNAMODE - CR-31 not working on a Windows PC

What are you trying to do with the reader? Could you prepare the files on windows and then use Linux to transfer it to the card.

I believe if the card is already setup for Linux as it would be once an image is on it for the PI, windows will no longer recognise it and will possibly keep prompting you to format if or ignore it

A SD card writer software should still be able to apply a new image to it though (For example "Win32 Disk imager" )

Regards

peter

Thank you both for your replies.

All I am trying to do is to create an exact copy of a working Raspberry Pi SD card (32GB) on a second 32GB SD card so that I can plug it into a second Raspberry Pi!

Surely that is something that many people have managed to do?

But I have tried with "Win32 Disk Imager", "Paragon ExtFS for Windows",  "Ext2Fsd" and "DiskInternals Linux Reader" and none of these recognise the SD card image.

I have not even managed to be able to make a copy on a Linux PC (did not recognise image) or an Apple Macbook (saved as a DMG file, but "Win32 Disk Imager" did not manage to write this to a new SD card as an image that would boot the Raspberry Pi!!!!

Thanks and Regards

Henry Kafeman

On  A Linux machine (like a raspberry pi), you can just copy over all the files. Should be a lot quicker than to copy over the whole 32Gb. (in fact I did exactly that yesterday.... :-) )

(For most of the commands here you'll need to be root, so prefix them all with "sudo" or do "sudo -s" once....)

To get this to work you need to partition the target SD card. Use any tool you like. Google for partitioning tools if necessary. On the other hand, if you have a bare "raspbian" system (and not based on noobs), your partition table is just the first block of the sd card, so:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/sda count=1 ; blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sda

will do the trick of copying the partition table of your running SD card to the one attached in an SD card reader.

Next, format the partitions:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

Mount the partitions:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

mkdir /mnt/boot

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

and then copy over the files:

apt-get isntall rsync

rsync -avP --one-file-system / /mnt/

rsync -avP --one-file-system /boot/ /mnt/boot/

And that will leave you with a raspberry pi bootable  image on the SD card that is accessible as sda.

Roger

Thank you very much for your reply which is along the right lines. Sorry for not replying sooner, but I have been busy with another aspect of the project.

I now urgently need to copy my SD card in the next couple of days.

So, as I am not very familiar with Linux, could you please show me how to modify the commands to suit NOOBS, etc.?

One SD card I want to copy was definitely created from NOOBS and shows the following details:

sudo parted
  GNU Parted 2.3
  Using /dev/mmcblk0
  Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
  (parted) print all
  Model: SD 00000 (sd/mmc)
  Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7861MB
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
  Partition Table: msdos

  Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags
  1      1049kB  1263MB  1262MB  primary   fat32        lba
  2      1267MB  7861MB  6594MB  extended
  5      1271MB  1330MB  58.7MB  logical   fat16        lba
  6      1334MB  7861MB  6527MB  logical   ext4

(parted) quit

df -h -a

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

rootfs          6.0G  1.8G  3.9G  32% /

/dev/root      6.0G  1.8G  3.9G  32% /

devtmpfs     211M     0  211M   0% /dev

tmpfs           44M  1.2M   43M   3% /run

tmpfs          5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock

proc               0     0     0    - /proc

sysfs              0     0     0    - /sys

tmpfs           88M     0   88M   0% /run/shm

devpts             0     0     0    - /dev/pts

/dev/mmcblk0p5   56M   19M   38M  33% /boot

So it seems the actual /boot partition is /dev/mmcblk0p5.

BUT what now do I need to modify your suggested commands to suit the information above?

Thanks and regards

Henry