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I wish to clone my SD card for backups. However, when I use win32 Disk Imager or HDD Raw Copy Tool I get told off in win32 Disk Imager for cyclic redundancy check. This happens around the time once the boot partition is finished. I did expand the OS to use the whole SD card using raspi-config.

Even though that I've expanded the OS to use the entire SD card from raspi-config, is it normal to still see two seperate partitions in Windows? One named boot and the other being unnamed or accessible. If it is normal, I will attempt to use dd, if it is not normal, then I will assume I have not expanded the OS to use the entire SD card properly and attempt to resolve that before I try to clone again.

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  • it's not very convenient to clone the whole card for a backup, because you'll end up with 16G chunk of data you cannot use except copying to another SD card and hope the card sizes match (16G from one manufacturer might be a tad larger/smaller than 16G from another). you'd be better off just copying the files you have changed and your home directory, everything else is much easier to restore from the original image.
    – lenik
    Apr 12, 2014 at 7:35
  • @lenik well I only intend to be using the same SD card, because my card corrupted on me last week and I don't intend to go through the whole install again. Though one day I might need to buy a different SD card - I see your point. I would like to back up all installed and configured programs, including daemons, scripts and system settings. How do you recommend I achieve this?
    – codaamok
    Apr 12, 2014 at 9:32
  • the day to buy another SD has already come, since "CRC errors" are not normal behaviour. regarding backups, you need to write down what software you've installed and prepend it with sudo apt-get install, copy and save current copies of your home directory and /etc, that should cover most of the changes you might have done.
    – lenik
    Apr 12, 2014 at 10:50
  • I think that's a little drastic. The SD card and RPi is still functioning well. Like I say, the error occurs once it hits a new partition, and with that new partition being something Windows cannot deal with... It might be a job for a live boot of GParted.
    – codaamok
    Apr 12, 2014 at 11:08

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Yes, it's normal. The standard SD card layout for Raspbian is something like this:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1            8192      122879       57344    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdd2          122880    31116287    15496704   83  Linux

That's off my 16 GB SD card. The sdd1 is the boot partition, which you can see is listed as FAT32. Windows reads this no problem. The second partition, sdd2 is Linux (ext4) formatted, which Windows has a problem with. As a result usually it just hides it. You can see this a bit better under Windows if you go to Control Panel, Admistrative Toosl, Computer Management, Disk Management. You'll see Disk X for your SD card. You can right-click on the second partition, select Change Drive Letter or Path, and Remove the current drive letter to hide it.

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