Raspberry Pi - transitioning between SD cards

When you want to swap out a Raspberry Pi model A for, say, a B2, one issue you are going to run into is that they moved to a µSD card holder. If your old A is using a regular SD card (that is, not a µSD in an adapter), then you're going to need to forklift the contents of your card over to a new one.

Well, that shouldn't be a big deal, right? All that's required is copying the filesystems from one to the other.

That's true, to a point... but what about when the target SD card is slightly (or vastly) smaller? I ran into this. I had a 16G SD card and bought a 16G µSD card and it was a few megabytes smaller.

Fortunately, I had a second Raspberry Pi and a USB SD card reader.

Take the old card and put it in the USB reader.

use "dmesg" to see where the SD card landed. If you have no other disk devices, then it likely will wind up as "sda".

As root, do a "resize2fs -M /dev/sda2"

This will shrink your Linux filesystem down to the bare minimum. When it's done, take note of how small it got. Add 500M as a safety margin to that and then as root run "fdisk /dev/sda"

Once there, use "p" to print out the filesystem. Then "d" and then "2" to delete the Linux partition. Yes, that's scary to do. Don't worry, we'll put it right back.

Next, do an "n" to create a new partition. It's a primary partition, and it's number 2. Use the same value for the start of the partition as was listed in the "p" printout earlier. For the ending, use "+" and then the augmented size you figured out earlier. When you're done, use "w" to write the partition table back out.

Next, do a "resize2f /dev/sda2"

This will expand your filesystem by the extra padding you added, filling out the now smaller partition you just created for it.

Once you're done with this, you can use 'dd' to make a disk image of the card. Eject it and insert the new card. Use 'dd' to write the image to the new card, ignoring any errors you get near the end (since the new card is too small). Those errors will be harmless, since we shoved the Linux partition close to the beginning of the card.

Once it's done, boot the new card and run raspi-config and tell it to expand the filesystem. When you reboot, the filesystem will be resized to fit the rest of the space on the card.

Once you do all this, the old card can be reformatted back to FAT32 and used for whatever you like. I use mine as a "sneakernet" drive for scanning stuff on our printer. It's easier than trying to use the network to do it. :)