Flashing an SD card using Pinebook Pro? Konsole?

[SanjevR]

Since we can't get balena etcher on the Pinebook Pro is it possible to flash an SD card using the Konsole? Does anyone know how to do this?

[nightranger73]

Code:

unxz imagefile.img.xz
sudo dd if=imagefile.img of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

you can skip the first command if you already have an uncompressed img file
unxz command takes a bit of time and gives you no output so just wait for it to end.
Always double check your SD is mmcblk1 using lsblk since the mmc number may change using other distro

[wibble]

You can avoid using the space for the unzipped image if you pipe between the extraction and the dd, or just use a tool that can handle compressed images in the first place. Something like:
xzcat imagefile.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync
Or:
sudo bmaptool copy imagefile.img.xz /dev/mmcblk1

As has been said before you're overwriting entire disks/ssds/sd cards so double check you've got the right device, and that you know exactly what the command is going to do in case you or I have a typo or mistake in there.

[NormandC]

I recently discovered bmaptool (mentioned by wibble) and I like it over dd, mainly for what the Mobian wiki indicates about it:

bmaptool is a comfortable means to flash your image. It handles sparse files, so it can be considerably faster than plain dd. It also handles both .bmap and .gz files and can dowload them directly from an URL.

https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php...image-file

bmaptool may not be installed by default on your Pinebook Pro's OS, but it is almost certainly in its repositories. I use Ubuntu 18.04 on my PC and I installed it from its repos.

I have found that by default, bmaptool looks for an accompanying *.bmap file; if it doesn't find one, it will throw an error. Apart from the Mobian project, I haven't seen other distros providing them. To use bmaptool without a bmap file, you need to add the --nobmap option.

Code:

sudo bmaptool copy --nobmap imagefile.img.xz /dev/mmcblkX

Hope this helps.

[SanjevR]

Code:

unxz imagefile.img.xz
sudo dd if=imagefile.img of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

you can skip the first command if you already have an uncompressed img file
unxz command takes a bit of time and gives you no output so just wait for it to end.
Always double check your SD is mmcblk1 using lsblk since the mmc number may change using other distro

Thank you so much for your response.

So I chose the Manjaro ARM image from https://osdn.net/projects/manjaro-arm/st...07.img.xz/

Intially I tried putting the uncompressed file it into my SD card which is 29.7 GiB in order to decompress it but apparently the uncompressed file was too large for the sd card. So I then moved it to the desktop and on Konsole I CD into the desktop. I then ran the first command: unxz Manjaro-ARM-plasma-mobile-dev-pinephon
e-201107.img.xz

The file was able to decompress from here I was completely lost because it was in the desktop and not the SD card so I tried moving the uncompressed image from the desktop to the SD card manually via a drag and drop and got this error

"

Cannot transfer ‘file:///run/media/sanjevr/6534-6132/Manjaro-ARM-plasma-mobile-dev-pinephone-201107.img’ because it is too large. The destination filesystem only supports files up to 4GiB



"

So am I just supposed to CD into my SD card and how would I move it from the desktop to the SD card?

I am confused as to where I went wrong? Also how can the img be too large I thought my SD card was 29.7 GiB I don't get it.

[hiimtye]

you're using a super old filesystem, probably FAT32

you can skip the xz step so you can store it on your storage medium then uncompress it as you dd, i.e.
xz -dc my.xz | dd of=/dev/sdx status=progress conv=fsync bs=1M