RC Logr 20200602 201003

Tuesday, 2 Jun, 2020

A friend reminded me of a great GUI utility called «balenaEtcher», which lets you flash OS images to SD cards and USB thumb drives. Etcher is way easier than using diskutil and dd, that is for sure. It just works. 🤓

Here’s what you need to do, if you want to do it manually on a Mac:

• Insert the SD card.
• Run diskutil list in terminal and find the identifier.
• Unmount the disk using diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN where N is the correct identifier. Don’t screw it up.
• Copy the image using sudo dd bs=1m if=/path/to/OS_image.img of=/dev/rdiskN; sync where N is the correct identifier, noting that rdisk stands for raw disk, which speeds things up. If you screw it up you can munge your main drive…
• Eject using sudo diskutil eject /dev/rdiskN.

Too many things can (and do) go wrong, so that’s why I like balenaEtcher.