Raspberry Pi setup problem

Damo 2k9

So got a rasperry pi for christmas, I knew how to set it up etc. I have NOOBS on the SD card but when i power it up i get this error message:
"Error resizing exisiting FAT partition..." and a few more lines.
Ive tried reformating the card and then putting NOOBS on it again but it just wont work at all no matter how many times I try it, has this happened anyone on here and if it has have yous found a fix for it??

Any help will be appreciated, thanks!

Johnboy1951

I haven't used NOOBS, but on first boot it should re-size the FAT partition and display this info on screen.

1st option:
Hold Shift key when booting ..... this should bring you to the recovery mode.

2nd option:
Reformat the SD card in the PC, re-extract the files from the NOOBS zip d/load, and then copy the extracted files to the card ...... making sure they all copy correctly by giving it plenty time.

Then transfer the card to the Pi again and power it up.

Damo 2k9

I've tried the second option so many times, although rather then extracting the zipped folder to its own folder, I've just been dragging the files from there, would that matter??

Stuxnet

yes, you are doing it all wrong, drag and drop doesnt make it bootable, your simply copying files onto the card.

To write a linux image to an sd card you must do whats called a dd of the image to the card.

Are you just trying to setup xbmc to the sd card...? if so, forget about noobs, format your card to fat32

if you want a simple way to install xmbc, try XBian

download and extract the zipped installer

with your sd card inserted into your laptop or pc and connect to the net, run the installer, it will download the XBian image and flash the card for you.

If you want to toy around with the pi, and different try linux's .img or .iso files

presuming you using windows, you can flash these images to sd card easily with a tool like diskImager

have fun

holler if you get stuck

Johnboy1951

Stuxnet .....

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4100

Just head to the downloads page, grab a copy of the NOOBS zip file, and unpack it onto a freshly formatted 4GB (or larger) SD card. When you boot up for the first time, you’ll see a menu prompting you to install one of several operating systems into the free space on the card. The choice means you can boot the Pi with a regular operating system like Raspbian, or with a media-centre specific OS like RaspBMC.

syklops

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

Stuxnet .....

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4100

Some people don't understand the phrase unpack, and think dragging and dropping is enough and then wonder why it doesnt work.

Damo 2k9

My bad, so unpack it rather than dragging and dropping it, yes?

aidan_walsh

Yep. Unpack/uncompress the zip file onto the SD card and NOOBs should boot up after that.

syklops

Damo 2k9 wrote: »

My bad, so unpack it rather than dragging and dropping it, yes?

Unpack it.

Damo 2k9

Still happening lads

syklops

Damo 2k9 wrote: »

Still happening lads

From the Rasp Berry site:

I had the exact same problem, could not safely eject and I think a reboot is not good enough. Here's how I solved it:

Rebooted my Win 7 with the middle choice in msconfig (Diagnostikstart in Swedish)
Formatted my SD card
Safely ejected, no problem now
Copied the files
Safe eject
No problem when booting NOOB in the RaspberryPi

Hope this will help you as well.

Stuxnet

Without trying to sound harsh or unfriendly, what are you planning to get from using the noobs distro anyway,
it has arch linux, fedora and riscos, (advanced user distros) you clearly wont be able use any of them at your current level of understanding as I see it,
so that leaves you with raspian or raspbc, why dont you just grab the .img files of those distributions on their own and dd them to the sd card, as described above. Save some heart ache, and get on with it

raspbian
raspbmc

pug_

The fact that you're getting the error "Error resizing exisiting FAT partition..." suggests to me that NOOBs is booting correctly and trying to install the distro for you so I've a feeling it's not a problem with getting NOOBs to boot correctly as has been suggested.

How are you formatting the SD card? You may have done so already, but have a look at the raspberry pi Quick Start guide, they recommend using the SD Formatter from sdcard.org...

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

If you use this tool when formatting set "FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT" to "ON" in the Options menu and that might help.

One problem you could have is that Windows doesn't handle partitions on SD cards very well, and if you reformat using the windows format tool it will only format the first partition on the drive, regardless of how large or small that might be. If you have more than one partition on the SD card then it's also a bit of a pain to delete other partitions and create one large partition as disk management via the windows Administrative tools won't delete the primary partition of an SD card. Instead the only way I know to do it without using a 3rd party tool in Windows is via the diskpart cli tool.

Damo 2k9

pug_ wrote: »

The fact that you're getting the error "Error resizing exisiting FAT partition..." suggests to me that NOOBs is booting correctly and trying to install the distro for you so I've a feeling it's not a problem with getting NOOBs to boot correctly as has been suggested.

How are you formatting the SD card? You may have done so already, but have a look at the raspberry pi Quick Start guide, they recommend using the SD Formatter from sdcard.org...

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

If you use this tool when formatting set "FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT" to "ON" in the Options menu and that might help.

One problem you could have is that Windows doesn't handle partitions on SD cards very well, and if you reformat using the windows format tool it will only format the first partition on the drive, regardless of how large or small that might be. If you have more than one partition on the SD card then it's also a bit of a pain to delete other partitions and create one large partition as disk management via the windows Administrative tools won't delete the primary partition of an SD card. Instead the only way I know to do it without using a 3rd party tool in Windows is via the diskpart cli tool.

I have been using this tool but still get the error message everytime I unzip noobs onto the SD card. I think im going to try Stuxnets way and see what happens.

Damo 2k9

So after a painless 10 minutes or so, its working Thanks for the help Stuxnet, the image file process was easier then I thought! Now, where the hell do I start