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Raspberry Pi 2 - Are 64GB UHS SDXC cards supported?

I'm using a 64GB Hama UHS-I SDXC card formatted with the SD Card Formatter 4.0 with NOOBS 1.4 on it. It doesn't seem to want to boot. I have both green and red lights on all the time. Monitor doesn't come on...

Any ideas?

unom
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7 Answers7

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The answer is "Yes" they are supported.

Apparently SD Card Formatter goes in and formats the card as ExFAT instead of FAT32 by default, because of its huge size. To get around this, on a mac for example, open Disk Utility, select the card and Partition it in two, formatting both halves as FAT32.

Then go round and copy the contents of NOOBS folder (unzipped NOOBS package) to the first partition of the SD Card.

Go ahead and put it in. It should start now, give it a couple of tries. The Pi 2 is very fast using this Hama card (does about 80mb/s read, and 20mb/s write with a reasonable iops, it feels like a snappy hdd) The actual setup, installing Raspbian took a little over 6 minutes. Wow!

NOTE: The first time it starts NOOBS will actually automagically resize the two partitions back into one for you. Voila... a FAT32 64GB card running on a Raspberry Pi 2 (this will work I think on the Raspberry Pi 1 too, but I don't have one to test)

Managed to figure it out in the end thanks to @goldilocks bumping me in the right direction with "green light constantly on indicates an SD card was found but it does not seem to be in the right format".

NOTE: If two partitions don't work for you see this post https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/32524/27866

Community
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unom
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Green light constantly on is what will happen if you turn a Pi 2 on with no SD card, so likely this does mean the card is not recognized.

Any number of blinks/flashes indicates an SD card was found and works well enough to execute bootcode.bin on the first partiton. Any number of flashes other than two indicates a subsequent error.

goldilocks
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Two partitions did not work for me on my new RaspberryPi 2. NOOBS displayed a non-descript error message when it loaded. I managed to use Disk Utility in Mac OSX Yosemite (10.10.3) to set up the whole SD as a single FAT32, copy over NOOBS and then it all worked. NOOBS will automatically reformat the drive and change the partitioning. Using Disk Utility: In OSX, open 'Applications' (Either from Spotlight search, on the left within Finder, or from the bad at the bottom), and then open the folder 'Utilities', where you should be able to open Disk Utility. On the left hand side click on the SD's root node (not the sub-partition, but the card itself above that. Please make sure you have selected the SD and not your hard drive). In the tabs at the top, click on Erase, Select the Format as 'MS-DOS (FAT)' and enter a name. Click the 'Erase...' button and then you will be ready to copy over NOOBS. You can get NOOBS from here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/noobs-setup/

I can confirm that this procedure worked on my RaspberryPi 2 Model B (1GB) with a SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-1 Card, 64GB (Class 10 - 30MB/s - 200X).

This link gives more details of what NOOBS will change the partitioning to, once you have chosen your OS's to be installed: https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/wiki/NOOBS-partitioning-explained

Alcohol is a Solution
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  • One additional note, at least for El Capitan (10.11.2)...using Disk Utility, when creating the 'MS-DOS (FAT)' format for the partition, ensure you select the 'Master Boot Record' scheme. Otherwise, this answer worked for me using a San Disk 64GB UHS-I card w/ NOOBS. – dirtybird Jan 19 '16 at 03:39
  • I was using the new Raspberry Pi Imager and it didn't write correctly to my 64GB SDXC card. So, I just tried writing the same image using Rufus (v3.4 in my case), and the defaults it used (MBR partition scheme, Large FAT32 file system) worked for me. It booted up just fine on my RPi 2 Model B (rev1.1). – AmoebaMan17 Mar 15 '20 at 03:46
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UHS-I does not work flawless on my RPI's (2), I have tested 2 16GB SDHC UHS-I Class10 cards on both RPI B+ and RPI2B and it works at first boot, second boot fails with misc IO errors. Bought a pair of Kingston 32GB SDHC Class10 without UHS-I marking, everything run smooth.

I would say stay away from these cards for RPI.

UHS-I is said to have a write error compensation, I believe that this might cause these problems.

The cards was brand new out of the box, formatted with SDformatter just like the rest I use. The UHS-I cards works fine for other stuff, but not on the RPI's.

HotRod
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Maybe. The 128GB version works according to http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards#Working_.2F_Non-working_SD_cards

joan
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Splitting up the sdcard 50-50 for NOOBS does work.

Alternatively, ddwrite a system image into the 64Gb directly and let it boot works too. It depends whether

iLuvHK
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I've got an issue in using a 64GB sdcard :

Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block

I just had to process the image on sd card in using the block size option :

sudo dd if=raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 status=progress conv=fsync bs=32130b
BENARD Patrick
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