August 23, 2014 – Today I spent some time trying to figure out how to get the Beaglebone Black (BBB) to mount an external 32GB Micro SD card which I purchased at B&H earlier in the day. I want to increase the storage space available to the BBB in order to upload all my current websites and programs and thereby have a local version available.
The BBB sees the 32GB card as mmcblk0. It sees it with and without rebooting. I initially inserted the sd card while the BBB was on. I used the ‘Fdisk -l’ command to see what partitions the BBB can see (identifiy). Sure enough the sd card is detected. I tried to mount it to /media/external but it shot back a few errors about not recognizing the fs and bad super block. These are things I have to research.
In doing research on the internet, some people said that the card can be accessed if added to an adapter card and then put in through the usb on a card reader. I looked around in my laptop case and found a usb hub that has three usb plugs one side. This is a non-powered usb hub. I wondered if taking the mini wifi dongle out of the BBB usb port and adding it to the usb hub would make it unusable. I would know shortly enough if I could not log in through a terminal window. So I plugged the mini wifi dongle and the SC card reader to the unpowered usb hub and started the BBB. I had powered it down in order to add the usb hub to it.
To my surprise the unpowered usb hub worked! And the BBB was able to see the 32GB SD card, but not automatically mount it. In fact it still viewed it as mmcblk0. I forgot to mention that I had also plugged my WD passport into the usb hub, but it did not power up. The 5volts provided the BBB were not enough to power it. The WD works off of powered computers. I not disappointed. It just means that I will have to purchase a powered USB hub some time in the future.
Anyway, I was still back to square one in reference to mounting the 32GB micro SD card. But being late, I decided to add this entry and photo to this blog and try mounting or adding the SD card some other day.
