I have supplied a client of mine with a Raspberry Pi 3+ with Balena on the SD card. I configured it all here at base, then sent it out to the client. Unfortunately, the client has now somehow fried the Pi, but the SD card seems still intact. They have bought themselves a new Pi, and swapped the SD card into it. Now they report that the Balena splash screen appears, but the application does not seem to run. The hardware is in an enviromnent without WiFi, so there’s no chance of getting remote access. My question is: should it be possible to move the SD card to a different physical hardware, or is the SD somehow tied to the original hardware?
I think it should be possible to move the SD card to another physical unit, yes, but I’ll ask the team to double check. Meanwhile… Could they have bought an RPi 3 A+ with 512MB RAM instead of an RPi 3 B+ with 1GB RAM? Both are described as “RPi 3+”… Half as much RAM memory could cause the app to fail to run.
Yes, I can confirm it’s OK to move the SD card to another physical unit. I’ve tested it and the team confirmed it too.
I’ll certainly follow up on the model A or B question with the client. In a similar vein, should it be possible to take a clone of the SD card, then burn to another SD card and run? The Balena image isn’t somehow tied to a specific disk identifier or anything?
Hi,
Yes you can clone the SD card and use the new one, there is nothing in balena OS that ties to a specific disk identifier.