ODROID U2 – Flashing Images on Mac OS X

1. Download the image of the OS you want to boot on your ODROID to the local disk of your Mac

2. If the Image is compressed, unpack it (if it is in ‘.xz’ format you need a tool like The Unarchiver to be able to unpack it)

3. Insert your SD card and check the currently mounted filesystems

gh0st:Downloads zer0$ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   371Gi  270Gi  100Gi    73% 70913436 26254530   73%   /
devfs          200Ki  200Ki    0Bi   100%      694        0  100%   /dev
map -hosts       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%        0        0  100%   /net
map auto_home    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%        0        0  100%   /home
/dev/disk1s1   7.4Gi  2.5Mi  7.4Gi     1%        0        0  100%   /Volumes/UNTITLED

*Note the name of the filesystem that Mac OS X assigned to the mounted SD card (in my case /dev/disk2s1)

1. Unmount that filesystem so that you will be allowed to overwrite the disk:

gh0st:Downloads zer0$ sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s1
Volume UNTITLED on disk1s1 unmounted

1. Using the device name of the filesystem work out the raw device name for the entire SD card, by omitting the final “s1” and replacing “disk” with “rdisk” (Important: you will lose all data on the hard drive on your computer if you get the wrong device name). Make sure the device name is the name of the whole SD card as described above, not just a partition of it (for example, rdisk3, not rdisk3s1. Similarly you might have another SD drive name/number like rdisk2 or rdisk4, etc. — recheck by using the df -h command both before & after you insert your SD card reader into your Mac if you have any doubts!):
   In my case, since the device name of the mounted filesystem is /dev/disk2s1 the entire SD card has the device name /dev/rdisk2

2. Write the image to the card with the dd command, using the raw disk device name from above (read carefully the above step, to be sure you use the correct rdisk# here!)

gh0st:Downloads zer0$ sudo dd bs=1m if=odroid-debian-wheezy-u2.img of=/dev/rdisk1
7260+0 records in
7260+0 records out
7612661760 bytes transferred in 709.578823 secs (10728423 bytes/sec)

*(note that dd will not output any information until there is an error or it is finished)

1. When dd finished successfully it will display some information and the SD card will be re-mounted. You can now eject the card:

gh0st:Downloads zer0$ sudo diskutil eject /dev/rdisk1
Disk /dev/rdisk1 ejected

1. Remove the SD card from the card reader and put it in the ODROID to boot your new OS image