But it was backing up perfectly fine to the SD when it was just one big exfat partition; why would putting a small fat32 partition before it cause it to break? The SD is just the storage location for the .img file in the end; why would it need to be formatted to ext4 vs exfat? I'd prefer exfat to ext4 given crossplatform compatibility is better.Pi 4B 8GB model with Debian 1:6.12.47-1+rpt1~bookworm (2025-09-16).
This setup I have now was working fine up until recently when the SD card was just one big exfat partition; the only that changed is that I added the small 32mb fat partition at the beginning of the card to bypass an error in the 4B's bootrom which causes it to crash if there is a microSD in the slot whose first partition is exfat.
I've just discovered image-backup works when pointing it at a backup file on a mounted SMB share, so there's something about pointing it at the exfat partition of this microSD that causes it to fail.
The first partition should be FAT32 and the second should be EXT4. Image File Utilities assume this layout and won't work with EXFAT.
Statistics: Posted by Freymotifs — Wed Dec 31, 2025 1:04 am