Booted Ubuntu bionic 18.04 from 32 GB se card on beagle bone black. How to access the remaining space?

So I have installed an image of Ubuntu on the beaglebone black and it works like a charm. But I am unable to see the remaining space of the 32 GB sd card. How do I access it?

I don’t know that this is your problem but I suspect the ISO you burned Ubuntu to your SD card explicitly described a partition size that was smaller than your SD card…which is the safe thing to do in order to support multiple different sizes of SDs.

To get access to the rest of the card, you have a few options.

One way is to create an additional partition and allocate the rest of the space to that new partition. Then declare that the partition’s filesystem needs to be ext4 (or whatever your preferred flavor of FS). And you’ll likely want to do this on the PC since it’s usually not a good idea to make these kinds of mods to the same storage device as you are booted on. It might work, but it might not…

Once you do that, you’ll need to boot linux back up and then modify a file in Linux to know to associate that additional partition to some directory in Linux. For example depending on how large the 2nd partition is, you might want it to be your /home directory or maybe the /var directory. But before you tell Linux to make that association, you’ll need to copy all the files currently in your /home (or whatever) directory to the new partition. Then I think there’s a file called /etc/fstab that will need to be edited to make the association between that partition and the directory you want it to represent. I can’t remember if there are rules with editing that file or not, I think I’ve always directly edited it without any trouble, but I may have just been lucky. YMMV so you may want to google search the “proper” procedure for editing that file in case there are some caveats worth knowing about. Once all that’s done, don’t forget to clear the old directory of the data you copied to your new partition or you’ll have orphaned data there just taking up space, inaccessible, and not benefiting you at all. You can do this on the PC if you want. Just make sure your Linux is actually using the new partition, not the old location before doing that. Write some “deleteme” files from within Linux and make sure it only exists on the new partition from a PC and does NOT exist in the old location.

The other option is to resize the existing partition to consume the entire SD card. Easiest way to do that is to use a tool like Gparted. The ISO of Gparted can be booted directly for doing things just like this. Although if you already have a Linux machine/VM on your PC, just install Gparted there and make the edits to your SD card there.

Good luck.

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