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I've got a regular Raspberry Pi B board, running Raspbian off the SD card.

What I would like to know is if I buy one of the new Raspberry Pi 2 boards, can I just swap the card over to the new one, and will everything run as is, or do I need to do a new image and reinstall everything?

Chris G. Williams
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4 Answers4

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The RPi 2 is backwards compatible with almost all software. I would recommend a full upgade though as it should give you the best performance. While we can run ARM6 code, ARM7 is better.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods (for the new desktop interface)

Then do a restart with sudo shutdown now -r

Jacobm001
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    The Pi 2 repositories are ARM6 and will probably stay that way for some time. You NEED to do an apt-get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade on a Pi 1's SD card before it will work in a Pi 2. – joan Feb 10 '15 at 18:15
  • Why is it necessary to upgrade and dist-upgrade? I would have thought that dist-upgrade in itself would be sufficient – askvictor Apr 17 '15 at 01:39
  • Just in case there's any confusion here, as per joan's comment there is no ARMv7 Raspbian (except for the kernel); the upgrade from wheezy to jessie is the same on the 2 as it is on the other models. – goldilocks May 19 '15 at 12:33
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Additionally, make sure to disable all overclocking and memory split settings via sudo raspi-config. You may re-enable them to Pi 2-specific values after the swap. In a pinch you may remove the settings offline from the SD card from config.txt in the boot partition (which is visible on other platforms, eg. Windows).

PiEnthusiast
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Read rpi1's old sdcard to an image, write the image to new tfcard. Insert to rpi2 and power on.

If your rpi1 sdcard image is too old, maybe can't boot.

Now you should download offical image and extract boot[fat32] files to replace to old image.

Btw if NTFS-3G not work, copy /lib/modules from offical image to tfcard.

Don't forget sudo apt-get update -y;sudo apt-get upgrade -y;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y;

I tried this successfully.

Phil B.
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IlPADlI
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I always take note about what is important in my Raspbian installation and then install from zero with the latest Raspian image. Gives you a clean system. I guess you must go with the latest image for working with the RasPi2.

Shak7
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