Developer Information

Here are some helpful things to know when playing with NOOBs.

Fixed first partition

Since the first partition is meant for recovery only, it is resized to a minimum. Therefore you could add a fake file with some MB to the SD card and later delete it. You have then more space to debug NOOBs

Wrong partition table displayed under Ubuntu

To edit the files on Ubuntu you need to delete the risc os partition table:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 conv=fsync seek=1 count=19
sudo partprobe /dev/sdx

Mounting first NOOBs partitions for debugging

To mount the first partition via GUI you need to rename it from RECOVERY to something else. Otherwise its hidden.

Custom config.txt

You can set custom display settings by adding a confix.txt file to the first partition of noobs. You should make sure that you have enough space and the partition is visible. You can also add this at the initial installation by copying it with NOOBs.

Rescue Shell

You can press ctrl + alt + F2 to get a rescue shell. Press ctrl + alt + F1 to get back to the GUI.

Login: root, raspberry. The current path is not displayed and tools like nano are missing. Use pwd and cat instead.

Can I get a debug log out of Noobs like dmesg?

Yes you can. Enter dmesg in the rescue shell (see above).

Can I resize the partitions?

Yes you can. NOOBs will only look for the correct mmcblkpX number. By default all partitions get the same amount of available disk space.

Change the data partition size at installation

You need to edit the partions.json file before you install NOOBs. It is recommended to therefore download an old version of a full NOOBs to get an example.

Where can I find older versions of NOOBs?

You can find a lot of downloads at https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/