How to prepare SD cards for experiments

Last updated: Jan 2025

Requirements

A sd card with capacity >=16GB

bootfs/ contains the rpi3 firmware and configuration files, which are are already provided. The partition will contain the kernel image to be built. Get these files from this repository.
UVA-OS/ contains user data files (music, picture, game assets). They are to be provided by the user.
- UVA students can download sample data files from https://virginia.app.box.com/folder/303726824749 (UVA login required)

We do not provide a WSL2 script b/c mounting sd cards from WSL2 is tedious, due to Windows security policies and the risk of nuking a native disk partition.
Instead, do the following manually:
- Plug in the SD card to your Windows machine
- Delete all existing volumes. Create two partitions, both FAT32. partition 1: 100MB; partiton 2: the rest of the SD card.
  - This can be done via Windows "Computer Management" -> Storage -> Disk Management
  - More details can be found from ChatGPT.
- Copy the files from bootfs/ and UVA-OS/ to partition 1 and 2, respectively.
- (optional) In Windows, create label for partition 1 as "bootfs" and partition 2 as "UVA-OS"
- Unmount the SD card from Windows
- Plug the SD card into the Rpi3

See the script make-sd.sh for details.

Use script make-sd.sh, which:

partitions a given SD card into two FAT32 partitions
copies files to the two partitions
- bootfs/ contains the rpi3 firmware and configuration files, and will contain the kernel image to be built
- UVA-OS/ contains user data files

Environment: Linux only (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04 native, or VM)

Cannot be used with WSL2 (SD card mounting is tedious)

Run the scripts

Plug in the SD card to the computer. VM users: further attach the SD card reader to the VM instance How?
In Linux, use 'lsblk' to find the sd card device id, e.g.

sdb      8:16   1  14.8G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   1   499M  0 part 
└─sdb2   8:18   1  14.3G  0 part

sudo ./make-sd.sh /dev/sdX