Can I move SD card from Pi3 to Pi4?

General Discussion
1

Hi. I have a Rpi3B armv71 (I dont think its a B+), running 6.24.1.

I just bought a new RPi4B 4GB but it came with something called NOOBS.

Can I just take the SD card out of my Pi3 and put it in the Pi4? Will it work?

Thank you.

2

Yep that should work

3

Awesome!

Is there any chance on ruining the SD card?

4

Well always thinks can happen. But usually it should work. To be on safe side, just create an image backup of your SD card.

5

Here is a testament to how stable Dietpi is, its been so long I forget the shutdown command, and I cannot for the life of me find it now.

Is it ok to just pull the power out?

6

never just kill the power…it massively increases the chance of corruption!

proper shutdown command is

shutdown -h now

7

Thank you WarHawk.

I figured yanking the power might be a bit of a no-no :slight_smile:

8

Well, that was a fizzer.
RPi4 would not start up using the SD card from the RPi3.

Choices : learn NOOBS or get another SD card and install Dietpi fresh on the RPi4. Neither are particularly bad options.

9

Hi

do you have any error messages while starting your SD Card on the RPi4. And I guess NOOBS as well should be installed on an SD Card. So you should have already one :slight_smile:

10

Hi Joulinar, no errors on screen, in fact nothing comes up on the screen at all.

I notice when I use the NOOBS card (which I see now has Raspbian on it) there is a light near the power connector that blinks red/green a few times and then the Raspbian desktop loads.

When I use the Dietpi card from the RPi3, that light blinks green once, then stays red, and the RPi4 seems to stop doing anything.

I dont usually have a screen connected to the RPi3, I use putty to access it.

Is it worth connecting the RPi3 to a screen to make sure there is video output?

11

ok I will do some test tomorrow. It might be working to put a SD from a RPi4 into RPi3 but not the other way around

Thats what I found on raspberrypi website

Model 4 (B) green LED blinks regular when the PI doesn’t detect the SD-card, and irregular when it boots, if the LED stays inactive (with power on) perhaps you need to repair the BOOT EEPROM code

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58151


ahh yeah there are some steps needed in addition. I found this blog entry.

12

Thank you Joulinar.

At this point I think I would be better to just do a fresh install of Dietpi on the Pi4 and reinstall the 2 things I have running on the Pi3.

Thank you for your help though, very much appreciated.