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Raspberry pi installation "Error downloading or extracting tarball"

Former Member

I am trying to install Raspian via NOOBS on a brand new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B w/ Camera Kit and I'm getting an error - Raspberry pi installation "Error downloading or extracting tarball" at 80% through installation.

I've tried half a dozen times and always get to about the same point 80% in and fail.  I've tried re-seating every connection and even unplugging USB accessories if they are drawing too much power.  No luck so far.
For what it's worth, this is actually a replacement for the original one that I bought last week, and that never booted up at all.  I'm starting to wonder if I am just super unlucky with these things or if they are really finicky and not the highest quality.  I'd love any help / insight here.

Thanks!

  • What size SD Card are you using, have you put other things on it ??

  • I have several PI2's and never had an issue, I use a minimum 8GB SD card though, 4GB should work but who knows with recient updates and additional support for LCD etc. I will be trying new images soon and if there is an issue I will let you all know

  • I agree with Peter as me too I had problems of this kind when on the first installations I have tried to use the 4Gb provided microSD. The point is that if you install also a minimally non standard version of the system - I mean adding some option during installation - or with some more hardware already installed on the device, while the system starts expanding some package can run out of memory.

     

    I suggest to use at least 8 Gb, better 16 (class 10 16 Gb microSD are almost cheap that is the worth if possible).

     

    Take in account that after the installation you are anyway not using the entire available storage space until you launch raspi-config utility to expand the default reserved storage after installation using the entire microSD available space.

     

    Enrico

  • If you are lucky enough to have a Linux machine or even another RPi with enough space you can use ""wget" to down load your new image

    it has the advantage that it will restart if stopped and also a nice progress bar  etc.

     

    http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

    You should be able to apt-get it or what ever your system uses then you use Shasum or Md5sum to check against the given hash to prove it's in one piece.

     

    Also if you are writing it using dd then keep the block size (bs) to a small ish figure say 128k (your milage will vary) this limits the overall write speed and seem to prevent madness in the card writing progress

  • Ok I thought it was downloading a new image, my mistake..... Do you know if this card has a  duff area on it which is causing the corruption?

    You may be forced to get another card (good idea anyway ) then follow the site instructions to put the noobs image on it.

     

    Unfortunately there are so many things that could be wrong its a matter of eliminating each in turn .

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    Hi

     

    I didn't think expanding the FileSystem from raspi-config applied to NOOBS installations.

  • in reply to Robert Peter Oakes

    Peter Oakes wrote:

     

    What size SD Card are you using, have you put other things on it ??

     

    This would be my first avenue of investigation...

    Make sure the card is fully formatted (empty) before copying the NOOBS folder onto it.

     

    If the card has been reused, there may be partitions which are not visible from certain OS's.

  • in reply to gadget.iom

    Hello Paul Ellison !

     

    What you says is correct as far as explained here: https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/wiki/NOOBS-partitioning-explained

     

    But if I am not wrong using a larger 16 or 32 Gb SD card maybe that during the installation and partitioning scripts some space is not used. I can't be 100% sure as I have done a great number of Raspi installations without NOOBS (using the debian images directly). If there is no need to expand the partition after the NOOBS installation raspi-config do nothing and is not a risky operation.

     

    I have used few times NOOBS because after the installation a certain amount of space remains anyway on the microSD unused where the recovery components and reinstallation components are stored. This is the reasons that after a couple of experiments I have stopped using NOOBS.

     

    Anyway it is very probably that you are right, thank you for pointing on this.

     

    Enrico

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    Thanks for all the responses!

     

    I am using the 8Gb micro SD card that came with the Pi, which was preloaded with NOOBS.  Unfortunately, I dont have a working SD reader right now, so looks like I'm going to be headed back out to the store to pickup a new SD reader and another 8 Gb micro SD card to see if I load the new card with NOOBS it will work.

     

    Fingers crossed!

  • in reply to Former Member

    If you haven't left yet you might want to get one of the "kits" that has a micro-SD, SD adapter, and a USB adapter for the micro-SD.  An 8GB or 16GB is usually 20-25USD for a Class 10/UH1 card, and you can get these just about anywhere that sells SD cards.