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I followed these steps:

  1. Download Raspbian Buster Lite from this page.
  2. Used balenaEtcher to flash it on an 64 GB SD card.
  3. Turned the Raspberry Pi on.
  4. Ran df -h which printed
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        59G  1.3G   55G   3% /
devtmpfs        1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           2.0G  8.5M  1.9G   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1  253M   54M  199M  22% /boot
tmpfs           391M     0  391M   0% /run/user/1000
  1. Ran sudo raspi-config and selected 7 Advanced Options > A1 Expand Filesystem.
  2. Rebooted.
  3. Ran df -h again, which printed the same thing.

Does this mean that Raspbian automatically expanded the filesystem?

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    "Does this mean that Raspbian automatically expanded the filesystem?" -> Yes, you have 59G total in your root fs, which is close enough to 64. df is really a misnomer if considered as "disk free", it should really be pf, "partition free". It reports the size and use of partitions, not storage devices.
    – goldilocks
    Mar 11, 2020 at 19:49
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    Why the downvotes? What did I do wrong? Mar 12, 2020 at 7:27
  • It's fickle. I'm not one (of the downvotes; I am fickle), but I'd guess that it is because the question shows a "poor research effort" -- which is a bit eye of the beholder, since things that seem obvious and clear from one perspective may not from another, particular if you are a bit under the influence of the paranoia which may befall those trying to learn to use a new operating system ("I think this means this but I'm not sure..." etc).
    – goldilocks
    Mar 12, 2020 at 13:54

1 Answer 1

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Yes, it will expand the root fs to fill the SD card on first boot. Did you expect something else ?

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    What confused me was this article which states that "By default, the size of the Raspbian root file system is 2GB. If you have an SD card with more capacity, the portion of your disk space will be unused." and the fact that that option exists. But I guess that you only have to use that if you move it to another SD card, right? Mar 11, 2020 at 8:57
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    Iulian, the article you cite does not exactly scream "authoritative"; this is an intrinsic possibility with online research. For example, if you researched "coronavirus", most of the information that you turned up would probably be valid, but certainly some of it would not, and some of that will conflict. Another issue w/ evolving technology is the age of a piece of information. There is a point in history when the filesystem was not automagically expanded. Unfortunately, many online sources cannot be bothered to date their material and instead present it as if it were timeless.
    – goldilocks
    Mar 11, 2020 at 13:57
  • I know, I wasn't paying enough attention. Too bad the official documentation (that I found just now) doesn't rank in Google search results. But even if it did, it's incorrect. They too mention NOOBS automatically running this, but I installed it without using NOOBS. Mar 12, 2020 at 7:26

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