Using SD card as external storage in Beaglebone Black Debian 8.7

Question

I had been working a while with my BBB and decided to update to last image, so I followed the guide on the Beagleboard.org site, I succeeded and now have the Debian 8.7 2017-03-19 image working just fine. However, before the update I had that same SD card as extra storage and now every time I put it into the BBB it flashes, so I would like to have that same SD card as extra storage as before.

Doing some research I read it was needed to have a uEnv.txt file with the following lines in the SD card:

mmcdev=1
bootpart=1:2  
mmcroot=/dev/mmcblk1p2 ro  
optargs=quiet 

I'm newbie at this so I don't really know how to do so and the information I have found is not that explanatory. I would really aprecciate some help in doing this so I can start making more interesting applications. Thanks.

Answer 1

So in order to update the card image it is necessary to follow the steps shown in the beaglebord webpage: software updates but only until the eighth step so the BBB boot off from the SD card, step nine is to program the onboard flash with the last image to boot off from there (the SD card will have to be unmounted).

Now that the BBB is booted off of the SD card, in Windows, if the df command is typed we would see this

debian@beaglebone:~$ df -k --human Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev tmpfs 98M 2.9M 95M 3% /run /dev/mmcblk0p1 3.3G 2.8G 295M 91% / tmpfs 245M 4.0K 245M 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 245M 0 245M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 49M 0 49M 0% /run/user/1000

so that we know the file system is in the SD card, then running fsdisk command will extend the SD card partition for us to have the complete space in the SD card for the our applications.

Now the BBB is booted off of the SD card and also having that same SD card as available storage.