impossible to clone SDCARD with Win32DiskImager on the same card : more space required !

  • Hi,

    I want to clone with Win32Diskimager the microSD card of my Raspberry Pi5 under Libreelec, but impossible because I always have the error message below:

    more space available.jpg

    Yet the 2 microSD cards are of the same size: 128 GB !

    Can you help me please? I tried everything but laughs, I am desperate .....

    Thank you in advance infinitely, from the bottom of my heart.

    Nathalie

  • The solution is to back the contents of the card and not clone (at block level) the entire card. This will also be massively quicker as you're usually backing up no more than 4-8GB of Kodi data, unless there are media files on the card, rather than the entire 128GB card. Learn to use tar.

  • The solution is to back the contents of the card and not clone (at block level) the entire card. This will also be massively quicker as you're usually backing up no more than 4-8GB of Kodi data, unless there are media files on the card, rather than the entire 128GB card. Learn to use tar.

    Thank you very much for your answer.

    But I don't want to save the data from my SD card, I want to clone it on another card to put this 2nd card in another Raspberry Pi 5.

  • Yup, so take the 4-8GB backup tar file, clean install the new device, restore the 4-8GB backup from the tar file. You'll be done 12-18 hours faster than block cloning a 128GB SD card. Users constantly obsess about cloning, but you don't need an identical card, you only need one with the same data on it, and that's the easiest/fastest route to that objective.

    NB: As you discovered, most cards do not have exactly 100% the same 'disk' geometry which complicates block cloning.

  • But I don't want to save the data from my SD card, I want to clone it on another card to put this 2nd card in another Raspberry Pi 5.

    Yet the 2 microSD cards are of the same size: 128 GB !

    There isn't an universal standard for the "128GB" size, so maybe one is 128.02GB and another is 127.99GB...

    If you really need to clone it, you can resize the big "EXT4" partition to be a little smaller. You can use a live linux (ex. any kind of Ubuntu on a USB-stick), a card reader - and the GParted program. A backup of the data isn't a bad idea before "playing" with the partition...

    And I don't know if this is better in any way (probably not) than making a "classic" data backup and restore to an another fresh LE install...