Putting RISC OS on SD card via Macbook Pro 10.7.4

Hello,

Just got my RaspberryPi. Slight problem now is I use a Mac.

Does anyone really clever out there know how to put an OS onto SD card using Mac? All the websites I’ve found only cater for the blasted PC user.

Many thanks for help.

You could try dd-gui.

There’s also instructions on the MeeGo site which can easily be adapted for writing any kind of disc image onto an SD card. But I suspect dd-gui would be a bit more user-friendly!

I’m assuming you’re trying to install the alpha distro instead of starting from scratch?

ok thanks for replying – none of these worked, but thanks for trying to help.

I’m assuming you’re trying to install the alpha distro instead of starting from scratch?

The alpha distro (13 Jul 2012) is a compressed SD card image. Once you have written that to an SD card, all further updates can be done entirely from the Pi, following the on-screen instructions.

When you say ‘none of these worked’, what happened?

Have you tried here (this is the recommended way to put a distro onto an SD card on a Mac).

Follow the instructions in Jeffrey’s link (at the bottom of the page). Works fine for me, every time (using Chris’s alpha distribution).

just tried the http://exaviorn.com/raspiwrite/ which seems much more straight forward, but although it said…

Transfer Complete! Please remove the SD card
###########################################
Relevent information:
> Debian – Login is pi/raspberry
> Arch – Login is root/root
> Fedora – Login is root/fedoraarm
> QtonPi – Login is root/rootme
###########################################
Thank You for using RasPiWrite, you are now free to eject your drive

when i plugged into pi and switched on it was like watching England play football ‘disappointing’..

message on screen said ’no filesystem could mount root, tried ext4
kernel panic – not syncing: VFS unable to mount root fs on unknown block (179,2)

Any ideas on what I’m doing wrong? I did follow everything to letter…

James

Also already tried the instructions on the MeeGo site using diskutil list, but that didn’t work towards the end of the process. It could be the SD card reader inbuilt to macbook pro is not good, but not had any problems using it with anything else.

thanks for all help again.

There’s not really that much that can go wrong writing the image to the card. You could try typing the command manually at the command line. Something like,

dd if=filename.img of=/dev/device

Replace ‘filename.img’ with the name of your image file and ‘device’ with the correct device you retrieved using ‘diskutil -l’.

If that still doesn’t work you could try a different SD card.

Im now not even getting the pi to boot up. blanc screen and red light on pi with very small faint green dot.

Is the pi dead?

Can we rewind a bit?

• What’s the name of your image file?
• Where did you get it from?
• What’s the MD5sum of the file?
• What size SD card are you writing to?

It sounds like you’re using a power supply that isn’t capable of providing enough current.

SD card is brand new Samsung 8GB Class 6

I think there’s a mistake in those Meego instructions. In step 6, it says

sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/diskN bs=1m

Try changing it to:

sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m

(The change being to use “/dev/rdiskN” instead of “/dev/diskN”.)

When you initially insert your SD card, you should see it appear on the desktop. When you unmount it using diskutil, the icon will vanish. Once the “dd” command finishes, it should reappear with a different name (“PiBoot”, if memory serves). You should be able to double-click on the drive icon and browse a FAT partition with a couple of files on it (“riscos.img”, “config.txt”, etc). You won’t be able to see the RISC OS partition, however.

I have used my MacBook Air’s SD card slot in the past, and not had any issues with the images it has created.

Do you think the fact it won’t even boot up now can be corrected by an SD card?

The firmware and everything it needs to boot are on the SD card. If the SD card hasn’t been imaged correctly, the Pi won’t even boot.

After I get home tonight, I’ll write up some proper instructions on how to create an image file (time/memory permitting). There doesn’t seem to be a proper guide that I’ve seen that caters to the Pi-Mac-RISC OS combination. I would put it on the wiki, but I’m not sure where to put it, so I’ll probably end up posting it in this thread, unless someone can suggest a better alternative. I think it would be helpful if there was a central set of instructions for Windows/Linux/OS X on this site, to save people having to surf to other places to find information that’s not entirely RISC OS specific.

that would be really useful and thanks for your time.

I agree they should include instructions for Windows/Linux/OS X in one place.

Can I ask again (because I didn’t get an answer):

• What’s the name of your image file?
• Where did you get it from?
• What’s the MD5sum of the file?

If you’re just trying to program the RPi ROM image from our site onto the SD card, it’s definitely not going to work. You need to be programming an SD card disc image which includes all of the bits that RPi requires to boot. And we’ve still not established if the image you’ve got is corrupt or not, either.

just managed to get Arch Linux ARM onto SD card and boot up the pi. No good for me, but at least some kind of success.

Hi Steve, Not sure I understand your questions. Im total beginner sorry, apart from my 1980’s Acorn Electron days.

No problem, James. What I’m asking is where did you download the RISC OS image that your are trying to program onto the SD card from? Also, what was the name of the file you downloaded and when did you download it?

Keith Dunlop spoke about RISC OS at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam, which was very interesting.

I seem to recall he mentioned the OS would be in the region of 6MB

This is the image below from website.

HardDisc4 (self-extracting)
2012-07-18 08:00:41
36e8181de80845a019b5d5d6da99681c