Step 1: Partition the SD Card

Overview

Partition an SD card for installing Alpine Linux on an Orange Pi Zero 2W (Allwinner H618, AArch64). The card needs two partitions: a FAT32 boot partition for u-boot and the kernel, and an ext4 root partition for the filesystem.

Identify the SD Card

Find the SD card device with:

lsblk -d -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,TRAN

In this case, the device was /dev/sdd.

Partition with sfdisk

Use sfdisk for scriptable partitioning:

echo '
label: dos
unit: sectors

/dev/sdd1 : size=+512M, type=c, bootable
/dev/sdd2 : type=83
' | sudo sfdisk /dev/sdd

This creates:

• Partition 1 — 512MB, FAT32 (LBA), bootable — boot partition (u-boot + kernel)
• Partition 2 — remaining space, Linux — root filesystem

Note: 256MB is too small for the boot partition — the Alpine kernel, modloop, and System.map won't fit. Use 512MB.

Format the Partitions

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdd1
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdd2