FriendlyELEC-Forum

ok, hitting something that I have not hit before. I picked up the NanoPi Fire3 and installed the 64 bit Xenial base image to microSD card. Once I had it up I did the normal apt update, upgrade, and dist-upgrade process. I wanted to back up the image so if I break something down the line I can easily recover as I normally do with other SBCs. This time around however when I insert the card into my USB card reader even though the device manager on my Windows 10 machine sees the drive and partitions on it neither Windows Explorer or any of the programs like windisk32imager, etcher, etc see the card and then conversely even the boot partition. Thanks in advance!

SlappyMcPhee wrote:
This time around however when I insert the card into my USB card reader even though the device manager on my Windows 10 machine sees the drive and partitions on it neither Windows Explorer or any of the programs like windisk32imager, etcher, etc see the card and then conversely even the boot partition. Thanks in advance!

Neither windisk32image nor etcher doenst need to see partitions to backup a complete image of the card.
Windows couldnt read it because Windows doesnt know any Linux-partitons types and filesystems.

And the other 2 programms do only write or read the card raw and also doenst know whats is really on the card.

So you should be able to mackup the card with this 2 programs (or USB-IT)

so there is no Windows based software that I can use to clone my SD Card with any of the offered base images once they have been written?

SlappyMcPhee wrote:
so there is no Windows based software that I can use to clone my SD Card with any of the offered base images once they have been written?

With this software you could make a 1:1 copy, but Windows cant read/show the file-system.
The software only do read/write the Bits&Bytes of the card withou knowing what they are.
For cloning a card that shouldnt be a problem for you