<div dir="ltr"><div>You don't need a sparse file. And you're telling dd to copy the whole disk and that's what it's doing. It's a 16GB card. If you had partitions you would refer to them as /dev/sdc{1..4}<br></div><div><br></div><div>To make an iso file from a directory you want to use something like <br></div><div><br></div><div>`mkisofs -o ${ISO_PATH} ${DIRECTORY}`</div><div><br></div><div>Keep in mind you still have no bootloader. You'll want to install one if you want to actually boot from that disk. Grub2 is nice. <br></div><div><br></div><div>-C<br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 5:41 PM Roberto C. Sánchez <<a href="mailto:roberto@connexer.com">roberto@connexer.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 07:02:25PM -0300, Rick Hornsby wrote:<br>
> A normal RaspberryPi image from Raspian is ~1.5GB as a zip, and as far as<br>
> I can tell, around or about 4GB when expanded and burned to an SD card.<br>
> I’m having a hard time taking the SD card and creating a sparse image from<br>
> it. I think “sparse” is what I want — I burned the image to a 16GB SD card<br>
> made some changes and then tried to use dd to create an image of the<br>
> modified card, and no matter what I do I’m always ending up with a 16GB<br>
> image file. The changes I made include installing a couple of packages, a<br>
> couple of python modules, and setting up some python scripts to run as a<br>
> service on boot. Nothing major.<br>
> I’ve tried to run zerofree on the card (to ensure the free space is all<br>
> 0x00), and then specifying ‘conv=sparse’ to dd but it made no difference.<br>
> I tried making the image on Linux and Mac. dd seems to be very similar on<br>
> both.<br>
> # dd if=/dev/sdc of=/tmp/sd_card.img conv=sparse<br>
<br>
It has been some time since I had to do something like this, but after<br>
creating the image with dd, you need you use something like rsync or<br>
qemu-img to turn the image into a proper sparse file. I have used both<br>
and either one should do what you need.<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Roberto C. Sánchez<br>
<a href="http://people.connexer.com/~roberto" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://people.connexer.com/~roberto</a><br>
<a href="http://www.connexer.com" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.connexer.com</a><br>
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</blockquote></div>