Why not providing NewIt SD images

[skimpax]

Hi,

I purchased multiboot Sheevaplug at NewIt with Debian Lenny on 8GB SD card.
I want to upgrade to Debian Squeeze.

I have trouble when trying to install it myself following procedure on http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html. In fact I get download errors during deboostrap, as listed also in this thread : http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,404.0.html

Note that prior everything, I have successfully upgraded my Sheevaplug with latest uboot (U-Boot 3.4.27+pingtoo binary http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/uboot-upgrade.html).

For sake of implicity, would not it be possible to make available for download all images of SD card bought at NewIt so that a simple reflash of SD card bought at NewIt with an external flasher be possible ?

BR

[NewIT_Marcus]

We already do:

http://www.newit.co.uk/drive-images/

[skimpax]

Great !

I will give it a try this evening.
NewIT, that's perfect, from purchasing, delivery... and support after.

BR.

[peter a]

For I could do with remake my SD image .
What do I do with the :- 0394496-NewIT-v1.2-debian-squeeze-eSATA.img file ? and what program to I use to remake the image ? , and how !!

and what the diff between the :-

ultima-?G-8017412096-NewIT-v1.x-whatever-eSATA and the ultima-?G-NewIT-v1.x-whatever-eSATA images ?

[NewIT_Marcus]

Choose a file that either matches the size of your SD card, or is smaller than it. Use dd to write to the SD card.

Code:

dd if=/path/to/img-file.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

The card manufacturers keep on changing the capacity of the cards that we buy. So far ww've had to shrink the size of th card image 2 or 3 times. The (decompressed) image size is implied in the file name.

[DaveH]

Is it worth having a small image and some instructions on how to fit it to the card? I went through this the other night, where I started with an image that was too big for the card and caused rude messages at boot. Fortunately resize2fs let me shrink it (accidentally to one only just big enough instead of the 7.x GB I intended)) and I recovered things.

The technique I used with a small image (1GB-ish) image is outlined below.

I used an SD card reader in a big machine, but it would probably work OK on a plug booted to NAND. Partition 1 must be boot, partition 2 must hold the filesystem. On my machine, they came up as /dev/sde1 and /dev/sde2 but on a plug they'd probably be /dev/mmcblk0p1 and /dev/mmcblk0p2

1. copy image file onto SD card using dd command. This is nice and quick for a small image.
2. run fsck /dev/sde2 to make sure it's a clean image
3. sudo fdisk /dev/sde
4. Delete partition 2 (note that it was only about 1GB in size)
5. Create new partition 2, allow it to default to the whole of free space.
6. Write changes and quit fdisk.
7. run resize2fs /dev/sde2 (add the -p option if you want to see progress)

Now you should have a filesystem that takes up the whole card regardless of the size.

Perhaps you could consider keeping some 1-2GB-ish images on the site with a note on how to expand them as above. That way it'll be quicker to copy to the card with DD and you won't have to keep revising the size. It makes it easier if someone wants to add a swap partition too, at step 5 above create partition 2 as something that's not quite the whole disk and then create another partition to use as swap before resizing the file system upwards.

It was surprisingly quick doing an expansion as well, much faster than the shrinking exercise.

[NewIT_Marcus]

Writing up some readme's for the images is on my to do list.