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Why doesn't the 8GB SD image fit on an 8GB SD card?

0 votes
I've tried multiple 8GB SD cards from different manufacturers, and the image always runs off the end of them with dd, and Etcher just plan refuses to flash with the error " The image you selected is too big for this drive\ Please connect a bigger drive and try again".

Is it an idea to chop a bit off the end of the downloadable image so that it will fit on a standard 8GB (or even 4GB) card without barfing errors?

I took a 'dd' dump of an 8 and 16GB card, and compared the sizes of the dumps below to the unpacked jevois images. The jevois image is 74MiB larger than the capacity of the 8GB card.

7822376960 jevois-image-1.6.0-8G.img

7822376960 jevois-image-1.4.0-8G.img

7744782336 8GB-dump.img

16012804096 16GB-dump.img
asked Jan 3, 2018 in Hardware Questions by theodric (120 points)

1 Answer

0 votes
yes, 8GB is a fuzzy figure it seems. If you are not buying brand-name cards you may want to ask for "real full capacity" and "taiwan chip" when you buy the card.

We use the smallest 8GB card we have been able to buy to create the images, an old class 4 by Kingston. The 8GB cards we include with JeVois turnkey kits are bigger than that so flashing the software to those has been no problem, at least until now.

I tried a while back to create the microSD image using a loop device as opposed to a physical card but there are some hurdles to that having to do with creating several partitions over a loop dev. We will look into it again as this would allow us to just set the size to 7.5GB or similar. We will also try just chopping off the image a bit as we read it back from the microSD. Since the last partition is not anywhere close to being full and the files are just written once to it with no editing and moving around, it should work fine.
answered Jan 3, 2018 by JeVois (46,580 points)
since we just released JeVois 1.6.1 this afternoon, I made the image smaller. Please try to download 1.6.1 and see whether it works with your cards.
Sorry for ignoring this for two-and-a-half months, but I confirm that the current releases flash successfully to even my dodgiest 8GB cards. Thank you for fixing it!
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