I had my BBB and I’ve been needing something to do i2C work with python or perl. Unfortunately, I was still on Debian 9 from years ago and couldn’t get the bits and bobs necessary. So I wanted to upgrade it to the latest Debian.
I was able to snag a nice 32Gb microSD card from a coworker. And I downloaded the compressed image file with my work PC.
But it was a bust when it came to writing the image to the SD card on Windows, I ran into the “you must be Administrator” screen which means an IT ticket and some waiting time.
I have all of the permissions I need on the BBB. But there’s not enough space in the onboard “drive” memory to hold the compressed image.
So I made two partitions on the SD card, each 6 Gb. And I marked them as FAT format (I think it was flavor #8).
Then I took the card back to Windows and copied the compressed image to partition #2.
Back on the BBB again, I ran the de-compression and a dd command to copy the uncompressed image to the whole-drive device of the SD card.
xzcat image-file | dd of=sd-card-device bs=1M
My hope was that the process wouldn’t be looking at the disk partition info after the start.
It ran for awhile and then finished.
I rebooted and held the button down for it to boot from the SD card, which it did. And I had my Debian 12.
Not only that but the 2nd partition is still available on the SD card so it must not have clobbered the partition table in the process.