16GB 'Noobs' sd -making copies & choosing OS -how to

Support Raspberry Pi
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I am interested in the purchase of SKU: CEOO279, located at

I am interested in purchasing this because I don’t have access all the time to high bandwidth internet connections.

My questions are this:
(a) I would like to make copies for my other RPi’s - is that legal?
(b) the sd card is equipped with several OSs. When I put the sd card into my RPI, how do I choose say Raspbian over say OpenELEC to run permanently? Alternatively what if I run the Raspbian OS than change my mind to say run OpenELEC, how do I select this.

Thank you

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Hi Anthony,

You can clone images of NOOBS, that’s fine.

To change what OS is installed on a NOOBS card:

  • Insert your SD with NOOBS.
  • Boot Raspberry Pi and as soon as the GUI screen displays the red raspberry image, hold the Shift key down for 2 seconds.
  • Deselect current installed OS and check the desired OS.
  • Select desired Language and Keyboard at bottom of screen.
  • Click Install (i) at top, left of NOOBS box.
  • The new OS will install (and should boot by default)

This process is only available on uSD cards flashed with NOOBS.

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Dear Graham,

Thank you for your reply regarding the instructions on selection of the OS with your NOOBs card and that it is OK to make copies of the uSD.

My question is based on the final statement “This process is only available on uSD cars flashed with NOOBs” I wasn’t sure what that meant. Since it’s legal to make a copies of the uSD, I would like to make copies of uSD and with a number of RPis I have.

Will I lose the ability to choose an OS if I use a copy of the ‘purchased’ uSD.

In other words I would like to be able to make copies of the ‘master’ uSD just purchased and be able to choose an OS for different RPis.

For example, on one RPi I may have Raspbian, another RPi 3 B+ I could have the MS iOT OS, another RPi I could have Openelec.

Thank you,

Anthony of Belfield, NSW 2191

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Hey Anthony,
Just to build on what Graham mentioned. When you do select a new OS in the NOOBs boot menu, if you’re selecting any OS other than Raspbian, you will be prompted to download the OS files during setup (meaning you need an internet connection).

I thought it might be worth mentioning considering your limited access to high bandwidth internet connections.

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I’ll be going to my old university campus to use its extremely fast wifi. I’ll have the opportunity to download NOOBs and MS’s IOT system on the RPi.

The MS IOT core is 900MB to download. I would like to know if I write and compile a program on my Laptop on a Windows platform, will the program operate on the RPi with the MS IOT?

Thank you,
Anthony of Belfield

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Might be worth checking out this guide

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Dear Graham or other authorised officer,

Thank you for your reply. I sighted the document you gave a reference. Another reason for using my old university’s wifi is I’m also downloading the community edition of “Visual Studio”. According to the comparison chart between the community, professional and enterprise versions of Visual Studio, there’s no ‘dot’ for remote deployment in any edition. Therefore remote deployment may be available in the community edition.

The page that you referred me to is very similar to the ‘Putty’ program where you connect machines with an Ethernet cable, select the address and the port number.

But it does not answer the question: Why not save my *.exe file on a usb stick and insert the USB stick in the RPi’s USB port and run the program from the usb port. It may answer my question of whether an *.exe file compiled on my laptop/pc when transferred to a USB stick and the USB stick is now connected to the RPis usb port.

Thank you,

Anthony of Belfield, NSW

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Hi Anthony,

If the dependencies of the exe are available on the target devices you are running it on, then it will work fine.

Yes, file system work as you would expect them to. And you can always FTP directly to your device.

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Dear Core Electronics team,
This may well be a recommendation to purchase the NOOBs preloaded on a microsd card. But for those who persist, read on.

I did go to my alma mater and used their high speed wifi. This has a lot to do with trying to download the NOOBs from the RPi site.

The wifi at my uni is super fast. I connected to wifi with a USB 3.0 wifi adapter (TP-Link) at 400mbs (no I did not mistype, it was 400mbs). I was able to download very large files in order of 600MB in less than a few minutes. Amongst other lawful downloads I was able to download the MS’s IOT for the RPi (over 600MB) in less than a few minutes.

That is except for NOOBs. Despite the ultra high speed wifi, the connection to the RPi site broke down, and the speeds were extremely slow. For example downloading speed of IOT was 6mbs, while downloading NOOBs was 0.250Mbs at most. In addition, the connection frequently dropped out!

At home, downloading NOOBS was slightly better at about 0.250-0.300Mbs but again experienced drop outs.

Then I reluctantly tried downloading using the method of the BitTorrent. This was the first time I used bit-torrent and is the last time I will use bit-torrent. The estimated download time would have been anytime between 3 hours and 14 hours. It was extremely slow. I uninstalled the bit-torrent client.

My final attempt was to google search NOOBS_v2_8_1.zip, (version 2.8.1 as of 26/4/2018) and was able to find one site at Rutgers university http://debian.rutgers.edu/raspbian_images/raspberrypi/images/raspbian/NOOBS/ and saved NOOBS_v2_8_1.zip to my computer. The download speed was at 0.258Mbs and unlike the dropouts from from the RPi site (even from the uni), I successfully downloaded the NOOBS in about 2 hours.

I made a backup copy of the NOOBs zip file. I inspected the zip file, and the readme file informs us how to install NOOBs for microsds <= 32GB and >32GB. The card formatter for MS and Mac is available at https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/index.html .

In sum if you are having trouble downloading the NOOBs because of dropouts even if you are using the very best and fastest university wifi, I would recommend purchasing SKU: CEOO279 https://core-electronics.com.au/16gb-microsd-card-with-noobs-for-raspberry-pi-3-model-b.html . Alternatively downloading from Rutgers University in the US will be reliable but rather slow at about 0.250Mbs taking about 2 hours to download.

Thank you,
Anthony from Belfield

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Hi Anthony,

Thanks for sharing those tips! Keep us posted with your projects!

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