{"id":553,"date":"2014-05-12T11:43:25","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T11:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redrobe.com\/mike\/?p=553"},"modified":"2026-09-21T12:54:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T12:54:37","slug":"boot-raspberry-pi-from-a-16mb-sd-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/boot-raspberry-pi-from-a-16mb-sd-card\/","title":{"rendered":"Boot Raspberry Pi from a 16MB SD card"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pi boots from SD card, and this normally means you have to have at least a 2GB SD card,
\nbut you can instead use a small SD card and a USB pendrive, as I show here.<\/p>\n

The Raspberry Pi only needs an SD card at bootup time, it can immediately hand over to a USB pendrive later, and here’s how:<\/p>\n

Take one ancient 16MB SD card – yes, 16MB – not the 1000x larger 16GB cards we use nowadays !<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You’ll also need a USB pendrive of 2GB or bigger (or usb HDD of course)<\/p>\n

1) select your usb pendrive in win32diskimager instead of the sd card, and write the image
\n(e.g. 2GB raspbian: http:\/\/downloads.raspberrypi.org\/raspbian\/images\/raspbian-2013-09-16\/<\/a>)
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

2) copy all the pre-boot files (9mb) to the SD card
\nhttps:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/84r95jovi4rlv64\/raspbian-boot-folder.zip<\/a>
\n(I had to remove kernel_emergency.img from the normal boot files as that was 9mb in itself)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

3) edit the cmdline.txt on the SD card to read \/dev\/sda2:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That’s it – all done, put SD card and USB pendrive into the Pi and boot up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pi boots from SD card, and this normally means you have to have at least a 2GB SD card, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":708,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pc-hardware","tag-raspberry-pi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":712,"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions\/712"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redrobe.com\/mike\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}