Raspberry Pi - Clone & Burn SD

This tutorial is for mac users.

Burn Image

Insert an SD card into your computer, then open a terminal window and type:

diskutil list

You will get a list of drives. In the example below I have 3 disks, disk0, disk1 and disk2. The first disk is my hard drive and I need to be extra carefull not to accidentally overwrite it with my image. disk2 is my 8GB SD card. Two clues are (internal, physical) and *7.9 GB. See below:

I need to unmount this disk:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

Here is an example:

Next I will use the dd command to burn my image onto the SD card:

sudo dd if=~/Desktop/some-image.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=5m

You can see I am using the device “rdisk2”. This is much faster than using “disk2”. I found this from a superuser.com question “Why is “/dev/rdisk” about 20 times faster than “/dev/disk” in Mac OS X”

This process will still take a good 10-20 minuts to burn an 8GB sd card. You can type “control-t” at any time to see the progress:

You should get from 4000000 to 10000000 bytes/sec (4 to 10 megabytes per second). If you get less than this you may have a bad SD card.

Once the process has finished you can insert the card into your Raspberry Pi.

Clone Image

Insert an SD card into your computer, then open a terminal window and type:

diskutil list

Again, you will use the dd command with the arguments “if” (in from file) and “of” (output to file) in reverse order from the burning example above.

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk2 of=~/Desktop/some-image.img bs=5m

Resources

• Download Raspbian: “Raspbian is the Foundation’s official supported operating system.”