BananaPro/Pi talk:SD card installation

Flashing an SD Card on OSX

It's possible, since OSX does have the dd tool like (almost?) any other Unix. However some of the features, specifically how OSX handles volumes, require you to do things differently.

I used the card reader on my MacBook Air to write the image to the card. My starting point is the guide on this article page, however I'm quite certain formatting part can be completely skipped. You only have to unmount all existing partitions on the SD card. On the other side it does not take long at all so I left it in.

Here's a guide:

• Do a backup. Really. (You will be running commands that can potentially overwrite your complete hard drive if incorrectly used)
• Disconnect your backup disk if still connected.
• Unzip your Bananian download. You can use Finder for this, it's ok. You should end up with an .img file. It has the same icon as OSX's own .dmg files.
• Put the SD card into your SD card reader
• Use the Disk utility app to format the card to FAT (which is FAT32 actually), this should be fairly simple.
• Open the Terminal app
  • From here on everything is in the Terminal
  • run mount which should print a list of all mount points
    • find the device node of your newly formatted volume, it should be called something like /dev/disk1s1
    • for me the relevant line looked like this: /dev/disk1s1 on /Volumes/BANANIAN (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)
  • run sudo diskutil unmount /dev/diskXsY to unmount the partition (do NOT use finder to eject the partition as this will disconnect the whole card, also the umount command will not work)
  • run the same command as in the Unix guide sudo dd bs=4194304 if=path/to/bananian-1409.img of=/dev/diskX
    • You may note that the bs parameter's value was changed, this is because OSX's dd does not seem to support the dimension suffixes
    • Do not use the pkill command mentioned in the Unix guide. It interrupted dd for me and corrupted the card
  • When finished, OSX will pop up an error that it can't mount the partition. This is because it can't read the ext3 file system and can be ignored.

-Trailbin (talk) 15:43, 10 October 2014 (CST)

Why Ubuntu step 2. formatting SD card

In step 5./4. dd is used to copy the image on the card which replaces anything with two partitions --Hjoe (talk) 07:50, 9 January 2015 (CST)