Emteria Installer ignoring my micro SD card

Izhar

Hi. I have a problem with using the Emteria installer. The installer is not detecting my micro SD card at all. I've tried to refresh for the new drive, reopen the installer, reinstall the installer, restart my computer, use many other micro SD cards, but still no luck, the same thing happened.

After some time, I've found out that the installer is ignoring my external drive (micro SD Card).
Here is the output of the Emteria Installer:

Refreshing drives
Ignoring system drive "Samsung MZVLB1T0HALR-000L2"
Ignoring external drive "Generic MassStorageClass USB Device"
Ignoring system drive "ST1000LM049-2GH172"
Found 0 drive(s)

I'm using the Sandisk 256GB micro SD Card with using the "exFat" format.
and using the Emteria Installer v1.1-37.

Can someone help me with this issue? Is it something wrong with my computer or what? Or I need to change or install something on my computer to make it works?

smieschek

Hi @Izhar , there is nothing wrong with your system, this is expected behaviour. We are automatically ignoring drives larger than a certain size so that users do not accidentally choose their external hard drives. SD cards nowadays are reaching that size, which leads to your described issue. Can you try with a smaller SD card? We will discuss internally if it makes sense to increase the size we're filtering out.

Izhar

Hello @smieschek, Thank you for the response.
Now I can flash the OS to my smaller SD card with a capacity of 16GB.

BadPi

@smieschek said:
Hi @Izhar , there is nothing wrong with your system, this is expected behaviour. We are automatically ignoring drives larger than a certain size so that users do not accidentally choose their external hard drives. SD cards nowadays are reaching that size, which leads to your described issue. Can you try with a smaller SD card? We will discuss internally if it makes sense to increase the size we're filtering out.

So how did that discussion go? I'm ready to delete this from my memory.

smieschek

@BadPi We are sticking to the current limit for the time being as we don't provide larger user partitions anyway. What's the use-case that you require so much additional storage space?

Ajass

Good Afternoon @smieschek, what is the current limit? I'm am having the same issue with a 32GB Micro SD and I do not have a smaller one to try with at the moment.

smieschek

Hi @Ajass
The cutoff is at 128 GB, so your 32 GB SD Card should work. What operating system are you using? Can you see the SD card mounted?

Ajass

@smieschek Thanks for getting back to me. I am using Windows 10 and yes I can see the SD card mounted. That being said it turns out my company workstation had a restriction preventing the installer from accessing the available drives and so it could not see the Micro SD. I've since worked it out with my IT department.

Nevertheless I appreciate your quick response, thanks.

smieschek

@Ajass Glad you've found a solution!

cpljames

I honestly thought this was a pretty cool project. But the whole idea of someone else telling me what size my disk drive SHOULD be is kinda shocking. Then following that up by saying that an end user can't figure out which drive is a system drive/external drive and which drive is the SD card? I don't see this as a rational answer at all and frankly almost offensive. Lastly, I also don't see a need to "explain" my "use-case" to anyone. That's a pretty invasive question to ask of your customers. I understand wanting to make defaults as such that nobody makes any mistakes. Why not just set the defaults to "ignore" those disks but allow it to be changed? Or ask "Are you sure?" in the install text? Or any other means of deferring responsibility to the user? Is there any budge in this? I can use alternatives if need be but I was really enjoying Emteria's ease of use. This whole issue is kinda making me feel icky. Please fix this

wat

@cpljames said:
I honestly thought this was a pretty cool project. But the whole idea of someone else telling me what size my disk drive SHOULD be is kinda shocking. Then following that up by saying that an end user can't figure out which drive is a system drive/external drive and which drive is the SD card? I don't see this as a rational answer at all and frankly almost offensive. Lastly, I also don't see a need to "explain" my "use-case" to anyone. That's a pretty invasive question to ask of your customers. I understand wanting to make defaults as such that nobody makes any mistakes. Why not just set the defaults to "ignore" those disks but allow it to be changed? Or ask "Are you sure?" in the install text? Or any other means of deferring responsibility to the user? Is there any budge in this? I can use alternatives if need be but I was really enjoying Emteria's ease of use. This whole issue is kinda making me feel icky. Please fix this

agreed, please change this. Android is getting too big already

viraj5221a

smieschek

I have good news for everyone having issues with the emteria installer: Android 13 by emteria for RPi4 is now available through the Raspberry Pi Imager!
https://emteria.com/blog/android-13-in-raspberry-pi-imager
Use any kind or size of flash drive you like. The userdata partition expands on first boot.