Using entire SD card

Product support balenaOS
1

Hi,

We use 64GB SD cards. I noticed that the balena dashboard shows that the device only sees ~6.5GB.

Would balena automatically extend to use entire SD card or do we need to do anything manually?

Thanks!

4

Hi,

balenaOS will automatically expand the filesystem on first boot. The default size of the data partition is a few hundreds of MBs so you seeing ~6.5GB looks like the expansion has already happened and your OS is installed on an 8GB media. Could you please be more specific about what device you are using and whether you have any other storage devices besides the SD card connected to it?

Thanks

6

It’s a Raspberry Pi with a 64GB SD card. Most of the devices show >50GB storage available, but at least one is showing only ~6.5GB.

It appears that the filesystem failed to automatically expand during the initial boot (IIRC, during first boot it expands to utilize entire SD card).

Is there a command we can run to run the expansion process again in case it failed for some reason?

Thanks

7

Thanks for the clarification. The most simple and reliable way to fix your issue is to simply reprovision the device, doing this on a live system often leads to data corruption so I can not recommend that.

If you want to dig deeper, the resizer runs as a part of the initramdisk, because not all of the operations can be safely performed on a mounted filesystem. You can find the logs in /tmp/initramfs/initramfs.debug and it might contain the error message.

9

I need to apologize. We only use 64GB SD cards, yet, somehow, one 8GB SD ended up in the batch :man_facepalming:. So, Balena was all good. It was a mistake on our end.

Thank you for the support - we really appreciate it.

10

Hello @n42, don’t worry we’ve all been there. Thanks for the confirmation!

Cheers!