Creating bootable SD card on Mac OS X

[colinj]

Howdy all, 

I just got my Pine A64+ in the mail yesterday and I've been looking around for instructions on how to burn an SD image so that I can boot it.

With other boards (Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black, etc.) I'm able to use something like:

Code:

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

When I try and do this with the available Pine A64+ Android images the resulting SD card will not boot the A64+. 

Should this work? Is there another way that the SD cards need to be created to work with the Pine A64+?

Please and thank you

Colin J.

[Andrew2]

Should this work?

No. Not with Android. And I think it's time for the Pine64 folks to come up with a Quick Start guide that outlines the 5 most common reasons why the Pine64 won't boot and users have to spend hours after hours without any results.

[colinj]

This then begs the question, what is the right way to get a Micro SD properly formatted and set up using my Macintosh?

[Andrew2]

This then begs the question, what is the right way to get a Micro SD properly formatted and set up using my Macintosh?

Just read a few of the threads I posted in today.

For Linux images it's easy, get f3, check your card and when it's ok, use dd to burn the image. With Android it's different (you need Windows in a VM or maybe this crappy 'Phoenix Card' thing runs within Wine). And there's always a great chance to corrupt the data you write to your card 'on the fly' when you use the 'wrong' USB card reader. But this issue can also be detected by f3.

IMO it's time for the Pine64 folks to overthink the state of documentation since the forums are full of complaints from users wasting hours of their lives since they are simply not aware what's needed.

[pfunk237]

This then begs the question, what is the right way to get a Micro SD properly formatted and set up using my Macintosh?

As far as i can tell. you have to use :  Allwinner PhoenixCard Bootable SD-Card Creator which is Windows only.

[GoZone]

This then begs the question, what is the right way to get a Micro SD properly formatted and set up using my Macintosh?

As far as i can tell. you have to use :  Allwinner PhoenixCard Bootable SD-Card Creator which is Windows only.

If you are in Mac just run a Virtual Machine it will work just connect it when it's in Windows mode.

[colinj]

This then begs the question, what is the right way to get a Micro SD properly formatted and set up using my Macintosh?

As far as i can tell. you have to use :  Allwinner PhoenixCard Bootable SD-Card Creator which is Windows only.

If you are in Mac just run a Virtual Machine it will work just connect it when it's in Windows mode.

So the short version is, if I'm not running Windows I'm screwed. 

[rahlquist]

This then begs the question, what is the right way to get a Micro SD properly formatted and set up using my Macintosh?

As far as i can tell. you have to use :  Allwinner PhoenixCard Bootable SD-Card Creator which is Windows only.

If you are in Mac just run a Virtual Machine it will work just connect it when it's in Windows mode.

So the short version is, if I'm not running Windows I'm screwed. 

You could rely on the kindness of others, if someone has a microSD the same size as yours that has working Android/RemixOS install on theirs to make a Win32 image for you and that img file can be copied to your SD with the dd command.

[gsinjari]

Hi,

I have installed android image on my 32 GB SD card using PhoenixCard, I checked the partitions it seems to me it is using 2.5GB and reset is empty. I run below command to dump 2600 MBs:

dd if=/dev/disk3 of=pine64_android_dd.img bs=1m count=2600

Here is the link for the file:
http://govand.info/pine64_android_dd.img.zip

Hopefully it will work for you.

[alwynW]

I use ApplePi-baker for Mac and have succesfully created a bootable SD card from Ubuntu and Remix OS img file. Now trying Debian. Will try Android later today.