Okay thanks... I am not sure if I manually changed anything after the imaging. I thought I didn't. But Windows wouldn't show me an ext4 partition so i would not have noticed I guess. But what struck me when I formatted that 128 GB card today was that Windows was showing no FAT32 option for disk space above 32 GB. That was why I partitioned it into 32 GB chunks to begin with.I am just not sure yet if that is also necessary with PINN.It seems plausible what the other user said that this ash thing might be some emergency shell because obviously it didn't boot right. But I am just guessing here. It did show e:/bootfs and f:/NTFS. Somebody mentioned this shouldn't be after using pi imager? I just caught that, was that true?
Yes. A correctly written image should have a FAT32 partition and an ext4 partition. The only way you will see an NTFS partition is if you let wndows format the ext4 one after imager has written it. It should also have an MSDOS/MBR partition table not a GPT one.
Things will get confusing if it has both types of partition table and they don't match.
As I speculated above, and am now asking you directly: after the image had been written and verified did windows popup with a message about a drive not understood or not being formated and offering to format it? If so did you tell it to?
If it did, and you did, that's why your Pi is not booting. Same applies if you manually reformatted it to NTFS.
Windows does not understand ext4.* ext4 partitions don't get a drive letter and show in Disk Management with just their size and "Healthy (Primary Partition)"
I know nothing about PINN but what I can say this this:
- Do not use windows Disk Management to modify the ext4 partitions (or any partition formated with something ti doesn't understand)
- Linux will not allow you to reduce the size of or to move a mounted partition.
*: third party software to read and write ext4 exists. Some free, some premiumware, some commercial. I've not used any of them.
There was a Youtube video that showed how critical it was to re partition a micro sd card to an estate "like you bought it, otherwise the image will go wrong" by deleting all partitions and reallocating the unallocated space. So when I did this (before the imaging), of course I formatted it as NTFS or exFat.
Could it be possible that if the residual partition is above 32GB Windows automatically goes into NTFS?
And you are sure the imager will write the residual disk space as ext4? Anyway, I think when the new sd card comes I will have some experiment about this.
Oh btw the multiboot didn't take for some reason. So now I created a single debian partition on that 128GB card and it did boot. PINN seemed to have joined all the partitions from the latter multiboot experiment into one big partition. fdisk shows these:
127M W95 FAT16
118.9G Extended
32M Linux
510M W95 FAT32
118.4G Type Linux
So I guess Extended is ext4? Okay I think I am going to figure it out from here. Thanks guys.
Statistics: Posted by LateDog — Thu Oct 03, 2024 5:31 pm