Moving to a smaller card, HOW?

[Otaku Wally]

Hi,

I want to move my XBian system from my 32G card into a 4G card. Since a 1:1 copy is not possible obviously, I created partitions on the small card and simply copied (cp -dpRx ...) all the stuff from the running 32G system onto the new (small) card onto the apprioprate partitions. The system however will NOT boot, though ALL files have been copied correctly. I there some bootcode I need to copy too, or WHY will the system NOT boot from the new small card? I mean even the XBian-Startup-splash will not be shown, so it obviously doesn't start AT ALL. Any help or ideas?

[Fabio72]

wikipedia btrfs

filesystem has snapshotting and multi volume functions embedded
cp will only copy the primary snapshot of a volume but not the filesystem structure so it will not works

[Otaku Wally]

It wont even BOOT, and THIS is done by the files on the FAT partition! So it should NOT be related to the btrfs filesystem in ANY way.

[Otaku Wally]

And sorry for being unprecise. I was wise enough to FIRST dd the contents of the BIG card (to copy any loaders and the boot partition) and change the partition table afterwards, so that the seconds btrfs partition would be smaller. Just AFTER that I copied the contents of the seconds btrfs partition from the running XBaian from the BIG SD. So in my opinion it SHOULD work, but still WILL NOT. I really have no clues anymore, where the error could be :-(

[IriDium]

Your easiest solution is to use xbian-config via ssh.

Run xbian-config and use 6) xbian copier.

Use destination as file:/media/"EXTHDD"/"FILENAME.img"

Use this img file to dd to a smaller SD card. Or use win32diskimager

[Otaku Wally]

This really seems to be the best solution, since the images will ONLY take up as much space as IS USED on the devices (but I thought you could copy the image only to a card of the same size ...)