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Installation: Preparing the SD card for the redpitaya
For the SD card to be bootable by the redpitaya, several things need to be ensured (Fat32 formatting, boot flag on the right partition...), such that simply copying the files from one SD card to the other is not enough to make it bootable. The simplest method is to copy bit by bit the content of the sd card (including partition table and flags). On windows, this can be done with the software Win32DiskImager. The next section provides a detailed procedure to make the SD card bootable starting from the list of files.
The procedure is the following:
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I open my ubuntu virtualbox on my laptop with integrated SD card reader.
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To make sure the SD card will be visible in the virtualbox, I go to configuration/usb and enable the sd card reader (which appears there on my windows system)
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I open the ubuntu virtual machine and install gparted and dosfstools with the commands
sudo apt-get install gparted sudo apt-get install dosfstools -
I insert the sd card in the reader and launch gparted on the corresponding device (/dev/sdb in this case but can be found with "dmesg | tail")
sudo gparted /dev/sdb -
In the gparted interface, delete all existing partitions, create a partition map if there is not already one, then create 1 fat32 partition with the maximum space available. To execute these operations, it is necessary to unmount the corresponding partitions (can be done within gparted)
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Once formatted, right click to set the flag "boot" to that partition !!!!!
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Close gparted, remount the sd card (by simply unplugging/replugging it), and copy all files at the root of the sd card (normally mounted somewhere in /media/xxxx)
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Eject the card, that should be fine.
The SD card partition shown in windows explorer is significantly smaller than the nominal card capacity
We recommend to use a program such as SD card formatter to re-format the SD card.