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My understanding is that the card reader can handle SDXC cards (ie >32GB) but that the bootloader has a limit of 32GB. Can I get around this by having multiple partitions?

The OS would only need to be the standard 8GB, but my programs would need to access files on a bigger partition. My biggest file is actually 20GB but I could conceivably split that into 2GB files if I had to, as only my own software that I'm writing would need to access it.

My use case is a Bitcoin transaction browser that only deals with the first 700,000 blocks, all stored statically on the SD card. Although the blockchain is 100's of GB, I've got it down to under 64GB by removing all the cryptographic data.

I'd like to distribute this on single micro SDXC cards to give away to a few other developers at a conference.

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    For Raspberry Pi Zero, 1 and 2, there is a limit imposed by SoCs used of 256 GB per partition on the SD/microSD media which is 8 times 32GB - so, not sure why you think there's a 32GB limit Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 23:52
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    androidcentral.com/best-sd-cards-raspberry-pi-4 "Another thing to know is that the Raspberry Pi only supports cards of 32GB or smaller unless you reformat them. This is because cards larger than 32GB are formatted using the exFAT file system and the Raspberry Pi bootloader only works with cards formatted as FAT16 or FAT32." Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 23:54
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    keep reading ... You'll need to know how to do this using another computer before you can expand a file system onto one, or use a tool that formats and partitions the card as an image - I believe when you write the image (raspberry pi imager for example) you'll be using "a tool that formats and partitions the card" - I had no issue using a 64GB card - didn't even have to do anything different Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 23:58
  • That's great then - the issue I thought I had goes away and I can get on with my project without delay, thanks! Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 0:01
  • @NigelSharp: the issue I thought I had... :) This is why the rules for a good question state your question should include a statement of what you've tried. Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 0:11

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Yes you can have more than 32GB on the Boot SD card. There is no problem. I have easily and without any special steps installed NOOBS on a 128GB micro SD card. It runs fine on a Raspberry Pi 400, and it can cope with my 20GB files too without special steps.

The reason the question was asked was to be sure there were no limitations before I forked out on the tech and invested time in the project. I searched Google "What is the largest SD card you can use on a Raspberry Pi 4?" and it came up with a very misleading article suggesting a 32GB limit due to the bootloader only working with some sort of FAT filesystem. This led to an additional concern that I would only be able to have 4GB files. All these concerns were bogus.

I'm not fully up to speed but the Raspberry Pi Imager (is that the right name for it? Actually I recruited a friend for this step) does all the hard work of installing the right file systems and partitions on the SD card. It MAY be true that the boot partition is FAT32 with the above limitations, but that's fine as the boot partition is just a little thing that gets the Pi booted on power up. All your usual files, your home directory, your programs, your documents, are on a DIFFERENT partition that is not FAT and doesn't suffer from these scary limitations.

DON'T PANIC :-)

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I don't understand why imager software doesn't tell you about that certain limit size. ExFat doesn't work on rpi4!

I got around that before, can't recall how I did it.. 🤦

Guess I used diskpart.exe to create smaller partitions and formatted them in another filesystem..

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