Checking a new boot microSD card

Those directions seem to favor dl/ing and installing the graphical Etcher, alternatively using dd.

Apologies for the unclarity; I used the section titled "Copying a zipped image to the SD card"

using the command line

unzip -p 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster.zip | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync

(adjusted for local condtions, of course).

The command worked, but took a surprisingly long time, I think it was over an hour. It finished with no errors, though it did report a one block discrepancy between in and out.

There's an sd card copier in the Accessories menu, is that Etcher?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

On Sat, 22 Feb 2020 02:21:11 +0000 (UTC), bob prohaska declaimed the following:

They released another version recently? Might explain why my last "apt update" said something about a repository change.

Might work faster if one first unpacks the archive, then block copy it to the card. Otherwise it may be so I/O bound that you are getting one chunk from the archive into the pipe (can the pipe hold enough for 4MB?), /then/ the pipe gets emptied, and the delay for the next chunk has the card/OS flushing I/O channels (and maybe triggering card wear leveling and allocation unit swapping).

Most likely NOT!

Looks like it was either the 4M block size or the "free" usb-microSD adapter. Tried it a second time after unzipping the image using dd and a 1M block size. The write finished in minutes and fsck finds error-free filesystems.

Thanks for reading, and apologies for the noises!

bob prohaska

It looks like there is an etcher for ARM in development

.deb pkg for raspbian buster

I think I like this install page for the .img better than the earlier cited

It is 'less ambiguous' about -1- the arch for etcher -2- unzipping first

-3- the 2 linux graphicals mentioned aren't for RPi; use dd

There are several threads including in rpi forum seeking a graphical for rpi with a lot of wrong/misleading answers.

I wrote it/ the .img/ w/ the Win Etcher via a USB2 adapter. It spent 15 min doing the write and verification process for the 7G .img.

That is, I dl/ed the torrent which fetched the .zip which sha256 hashed ok which I unzipped to the 7G img which I wrote w/ Win etcher. I considered using Win Rufus in dd mode, but I wanted to see some more etcher operation. I've used Rufus quite a lot and I would consider it my 'favorite' usb .iso writer except that it can't do persistence or multiboot writing, so it is just for non-persistent one-off/s.

For persistence using Ub (and some Deb) distros, I like mkusb from its .ppa repo best. For multiboot I usually use the Win Yumi, which can also do persistence, but it sometimes doesn't work w/ distro/s which aren't in its stable/line-up.