Moving Volumio to larger SD card on Raspberry Pi

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I’ve just moved my Raspberry Pi Volumio from a small card to a 128GB card, to give me space to store my music library on the card. After a lot of searching different sources I found it straightforward, but having a spare morning I thought I’d write it up for fellow simpletons like me!

First step was to clone Volumio from the original SD card to the 128GB SD card using Win32 Disk Imager. I then needed to enlarge Partition 3 on the new card to make use of at least some of the additional space on it. Gparted seemed the obvious choice.

To get Gparted I downloaded and ran Tuxboot, which allowed me to choose Gparted and install it on a USB stick. Simpler than I thought.

On another machine I opened this video, the last section of which is a good tutorial on how to use Gparted.

I then removed the SD card and booted up from the USB stick, following the advice in the video to accept all the defaults, and lo and behold there was a Gparted window with all my drives! Following the video I inserted the SD card and refreshed Gparted and there was my SD card with a whole lot of free space to the right of Partition 3. I decided to use all but about 30GB of this to expand the partition, and remembered to tick the green confirmation to set the process underway. Once done, I exited, removed the SD card and USB stick and rebooted. Put the SD card back in the Pi, started Volumio, gave it a couple of minutes and there in Windows File Explorer was the Samba share ready for me to copy in all of my library. Job done.

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i just loaded gparted on to a raspberry OS on a usb stick and resized the sd.

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Which sounds simple enough, but hides a whole lot of knowledge which I didn’t have. I think you underestimate my ignorance!

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FWIW, you can do the achieve a resize directly from a running Volumio instance…

touch /boot/resize-volumio-datapart
sudo reboot

And for your quest for knowledge – to understand what it does have a look at Run out of space, so cloned to bigger SD card. Cannot expand the partition - #5 by ashthespy

Cheers :slight_smile:

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That was one of the posts I read beforehand. I didn’t understand the explanation, and didn’t want to try the command in case it didn’t give me resize options.

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@ashthespy
ash i needed to resize for smaller sd that’s why i used gparted…

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Useful post!

Unfortunately I found it after I pieced some of this together myself :confused: kept getting older search results which were not that helpful!

Anyway… hopefully to confirm/help anyone else.
I have just upgraded my Volumio (Installed on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1) from an 8GB Micro SD with USB Storage, to a 200GB SD card storage, as my USB drive started to fail.

200GB looked like a good price point for my needs 350ish albums Compressed with FLAC at the moment occupying 108GB.

So This is what I did/found.

1)WIN32Diskimiger was used to copy my Volumio Image. Create a file first to make the image into (it doesn’t create one for you), then write the Old data into that, then swap and write to the new SD from that file.

2)Check Volumio works,

3)Telnet into Volumio use command

df

to check your volume sizes, and be dissapointed they are not any bigger than last time.

  1. As in the post above. This will get volumio to resize the partitions filling the new card

touch /boot/resize-volumio-datapart
sudo reboot

  1. telnet back into Volumio run comand df to see new volume space, and be pleased.

  2. Transfer Music from old USB drive to the INTERNAL folder. This is CaSe specific. you can find the USB and internal folder in the “mnt” directory

cd /mnt
sudo cp -r USB/Volumio/* INTERNAL

All being well it will look like nothing is happening, there is no file transfer/progress information but your Pi will be busy copying files across. You can load another Terminal to check on progress, or look at the INTERNAL folder within windows file manager to check on progress. For my install its about 2hrs. Once your happy its doing it, Id leave it to it!

Windows file Manager type “\Volumio” into the address bar.

  1. Make Tea, Coffee etc this will take a while. but once complete, power down the Pi, unplug the USB and restart the Pi. All should be good with your new Internal storage of music. :slight_smile:

You can move the files within windows, but this will be painfully slow, as its not doing it internally, I would only use this for copying new music across.

Hope this helps as an update to the whole process, for anyone that doesn’t mess around in the system frequently.

Wheaty

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