Creating a Parallella SD card on Macintosh

[cbv1062]

Please read the whole post before starting.

First thing download the complete image (<releasename>.img.gz) from ftp://ftp.parallella.org/sd_images
More than likely the downloaded file will be in your Downloads folder. So the .img.gz is compressed. Double click on it and now you will have the file you want that ends only in .img

Ok for the Macintosh first insert the SD card and format it with fat32 and name it something to differentiate it from the other drives on you computer using Disk Utility. Then quit Disk Utility. Now open Terminal. Any time you see quotes do not type them in. In the Terminal window type

"diskutil list" hit enter

My screen looked like this.

diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *256.1 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_RAID 255.7 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *256.1 GB disk1
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_RAID 255.7 GB disk1s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk1s3
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Boondoggle *511.4 GB disk2
/dev/disk4
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *63.9 GB disk4
1: DOS_FAT_32 PARALLELLA 63.9 GB disk4s1

Now look for your SD Card. For me it was listed as /dev/disk4 I know that because I named the partition PARALLELLA. Make sure you choose the right disk or you could screw up one of your hard drives. Now you want to unmount your disk NOT EJECT! REMEMBER IF YOU SEE disk4 that is my disk change 4 to whatever YOUR drive number is! To do this type

"diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4" hit enter

Once that is done type

"dd if=/path/to/image.img of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=1m"

If you are not unix savvy I will break it down for you. When it says /path/to/image.img and you have no idea how to find that path no problem. Now in terminal type

"dd if=" now in the finder find your .img click and hold and drag it to the terminal window. BOOM the path to your image is automatically populated. Then type the rest

"of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=1m"

So for me the whole thing looked like this

“dd if=/Users/sweet/Downloads/ubuntu-lxde-14.03.06-p16g1.img of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=1m” hit enter

Once this process starts it will look like nothing is happening. Just wait it can take a long time. A message will eventually pop up once it is complete.

"What do I do if it says permission denied?" Glad you asked. This time type in sudo before hand so it would look like this

"sudo dd if=/Users/sweet/Downloads/ubuntu-lxde-14.03.06-p16g1.img of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=1m"

It will prompt you for the administrators password. Type it in and wait. You should be good to go. Sorry this is so long.

I hope this makes sense and it is useful to someone. This is my first tutorial.

[Calle]

Thank you!

[cbv1062]

No problem and thank you for saying that. This was my first guide and I was worried that it was crap or it was not easy to understand.

[9600]

@cbv1062 I'd just like to add my thanks also! And I wondered if there is any chance you could add a page with this info on the eLinux wiki, and perhaps link to it from the .

Cheers,

Andrew

[shodruk]

This tutorial must be very useful for MacOS users.

[Transcendental]

Nice work, cbv1062 !

[cbv1062]

[Calle]

[seandoyle]

Thank you. This was perfect.

[NuisanceParameter]

Hey, since I'm always paranoid with dd of overwriting other drives, I always write a script to add a little "safety." Thought I'd share this with folks. Tested with Mavericks. Mac-only. The idea is it will search and target an inserted drive with a partition called "PARALLELLA"

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n3panc70wsbjw ... lla_mac.sh