devgrinder
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2016 7:32 pm

Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Tue May 03, 2016 4:56 am

I need to provision several SD cards with an identical stack. It will include Raspbian, Chromium, unclutter, etc.

Once I've provisioned the first SD card by downloading and installing all of this software, is there a recommended method for cloning the card's contents on to the other cards, so I don't have to go through the download and install process for every card? I'm using a Mac to provision the cards.

Much thanks for any recommendations!

ghans
Posts: 7882
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 8:30 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Tue May 03, 2016 5:29 am

Read a image with Win32DiskImager and use the same
software to burn it again.

On Linux use dd or dcfldd , the latter supports writing to
multiple cards at once !


You might want to resize your partitions beforehand
since most SD cards are not exactly as big as advertised ,
and vary in their usable capacity (even from the same manufacturer) .
Win32DiskImager can't cope with a single byte difference between cards

Use GParted on a Live CD or on Linux directly to solve this.

ghans
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devgrinder
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2016 7:32 pm

Re: Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Tue May 03, 2016 6:03 pm

Can anyone recommend a solution that would work on Mac OS?

stderr
Posts: 2178
Joined: Sat Dec 01, 2012 11:29 pm

Re: Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Tue May 03, 2016 6:13 pm

devgrinder wrote:Can anyone recommend a solution that would work on Mac OS?
You can write to sdcards using dd on the mac as far as I know. Ideally though you'd be best set up being able to make changes and then copy to your cards. You can most easily chroot and run things like apt-get and whatever if you working on code that is supported by the system you are working with, so that would argue for doing this directly on a pi.

fruitoftheloom
Posts: 23337
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2014 12:40 pm
Location: Delightful Dorset

Re: Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Tue May 03, 2016 6:28 pm

devgrinder wrote:Can anyone recommend a solution that would work on Mac OS?

http://www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/ra ... e-pi-baker
Rather than negativity think outside the box !
RPi 4B 4GB (SSD Boot)..
Asus ChromeBox 3 Celeron is my other computer...

ghans
Posts: 7882
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 8:30 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Wed May 04, 2016 10:28 am

dd should work on Mac OS.


ghans
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Graymalk
Posts: 55
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 8:33 pm

Re: Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Thu May 05, 2016 1:46 am

ghans wrote:dd should work on Mac OS.


ghans
It does! It works perfectly.

ghans
Posts: 7882
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 8:30 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Provisioning Multiple SD Cards

Thu May 05, 2016 7:25 am

Where would a Mac user get dcfldd from ? Homebrew ?

ghans
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