Pi SD card from Mac problems

I am new to Raspberry Pi and am having problems producing boot SD cards from my MacBook Pro (Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5).

I have tried following the instructions for both the new NOOBS and the old 'dd' type install for raspian images with no success. On boot there is no output to the screen or even valid video signal.

The Pi is working with the card from the factory and I have even bought a second pi and used the SD card from that as the target for the dd and the format/copy with no result.

Has anyone any thoughts/suggestions??

Bob

0 johnbeetem over 11 years ago

There are a bunch of SD Card suggestions at the RasPi Troubleshooting Wiki and the RasPi Hardware Wiki.
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0 fvan over 11 years ago
Can you please post the exact dd command used, just to be able to rule that out as a potential problem ?

What I do when creating SD card for pi from Mac:
diskutil list (figure out the device id of your SD card (/dev/diskX)
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX
dd if=image.img of=/dev/diskX bs=1M (might be "1m" instead of "1M", not sure anymore ...)

SD card should then be usable for the pi.
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0 Former Member over 11 years ago in reply to fvan

I am doing exactly the same except for the dd

sudo dd of=/dev/disk1 if=~/pi/os/raspbian/2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian.img
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0 gallomimia over 11 years ago in reply to Former Member

Hi. I had this problem also. The issue is that there are TWO device id's that you can find for your sd card. One is the partition, one is the device itself. Usually there's some kind of extra number at the end. You'll want to use the device and not the partition to write this image to the SD card, due to the requirement that it be bootable.

Hope that sorts you out!

====

Just tried my sd card in my mac laptop, and used your interesting method of diskutil list (which I wish i'd known about when i flashed my sd card!) And it is the same as yours. It is already flashed, so it says disk1 is the sd card, a 58mb partition in fat32 is disk1s1 and the linux partition is disk1s2

So I guess you're doing it correctly. Checksum the disk image and then start eliminating hardware problems, such as trying a different SD, other things like power supply issues, and bad pin contact with the pi.
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0 Former Member over 11 years ago

DD is hit and miss on the new kernel.( i stumbled across that doing the same) I ended up just making a new one from the image I downloaded.(sounds like you are trying to mirror the build you already have and avoid the upgrade downloads). if so, suck it up and start from scratch. You'll be better off in the end with the practice of reconfig.
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0 fuffkin over 11 years ago

Hi Bob,

I'm using a Mac and I had all manner of trouble trying to format an SD Card on my Mac. I think I originally used DD from the command line and ended up reformatting my Time Capsule instead. Epic Fail!

What I ended up using which was oodles more friendly was "SD Formatter" from https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/ which is an application. As far as I can remember (and my sketchy notes) for NOOBS,
- I formatted for 4Gb or above. I close Erase Format, but could do a quick one if need be.
- download NOOB zip file and unzip it. Copy to the SD Card.
- Boot up your Pi.

I hope this helps and works for you

Jon
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