Raspberry Pi 2 4G Raspbian Image Gotcha
I ran into an issue setting up a new 8G micro SD card for use with my Raspberry Pi 2 and wanted to capture the description of the problem, here, because I wasted at least 2 hours fighting this and not finding anything on the internet that described the exact problem I had. The final solution was a real “DUH!” moment. Steps: I simply downloaded the Raspbian generic image and used dd to load the image onto my 8G SD card. Then booted the Pi 2 with new image successfully and then ran sudo apt-get update and finally sudo apt-get upgrade. The upgrade seemed to take a long time, but I wasn’t too concerned since this is a Pi, not an AMD 8350. Symptoms: – The upgrade took a long time. – After the reboot the Pi would not show the normal system loading screen, only a black screen with a sporadically flashing cursor in the upper left corner. The green LED would flash and almost make it seem like it was going to do something, but nothing ever happened. Problem: The actual problem is a matter of storage space. Palm to forehead!!! The files of the Raspbian image took up the majority of the 4G partition it created on the 8G SD card. Then when I ran the upgrade the packages that were downloaded completely filled the remaining space and didn’t successfully install. Because the upgrade took so long I walked away and didn’t babysit the install and figured everything was okay. Rebooted and WHAMMO! NO JOY!!! I kept thinking something was wrong with the SD card. Solution: The key is to resize the disk to expand the partition back to the full 8G size. There is a simple way to do this right from the default GUI. THEN, do the apt-get update and upgrade.