possible to install armbian with dd?

[bsammon]

Is it possible to install armbian using dd?

 

I see the instructions say to use USBImager is recommended.  However, my situation is that the computer I am using is an ARM64 running Linux, and it appears there is not a binary download of USBImager available for ARM64-linux.

 

I could compile my own copy of USBImager, but it seems  like it might be simpler to use dd.  Or--is there an alternative to USBImager that I could install on my ARM64-linux (debian), preferably using the package manager?

 

[Werner]

Of course, dd works too. The major issue with using this though is the lack of verification. While rare either dd or the target device can cause issues which are not detected while writing but when trying to read from the written device.

USBimager and others like etcher verify all written data  to make sure there is no issue.

So if you run into weird hard to explain troubles, this could be a reason.

 

arm64 download: https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/-/blob/binaries/usbimager_1.0.10-aarch64-linux-x11.zip

[bsammon]

Since starting this thread, i've tried two things:

1. I tried dd, which resulted a SD-card that didn't boot.
2. I found a binary of usbimager and a linux install that were the same arch, but didn't run, because I didn't have the right libraries.

So I have the following questions:

1. I've used dd successfully dozens of times over the years, but I need some basic information on how it's supposed to be used in this instance:
   1. Am I supposed to un-compress it before dd-ing?
   2. Am I supposed to partition the SD-card and write the image to a partition, or write the image to the entire card?
   3. Does it matter what size the card is?  (I'm sure too-small is a problem, but I'm not sure where the threshold is.  In any case the relevant question for me is - is there such a thing as too large (other than hardware compatibility with my computer))
2. If I'm going to use usb-imager, is there a list of what libraries it needs, or a (deb preferably) package with a proper set of dependency requirements?

Also, if I've written the image correctly, would I be able to mount/inspect the resulting SD card on an already-booted linux system to verify manually?

 

[Werner]

2 hours ago, bsammon said:

Am I supposed to un-compress it before dd-ing?

Yes. Tools like etcher or USBimager can decompress images on-the-fly. dd cannot do that.

 

2 hours ago, bsammon said:

Am I supposed to partition the SD-card and write the image to a partition, or write the image to the entire card?

Latter since the image may already contain partitions, depending on board.

 

2 hours ago, bsammon said:

Does it matter what size the card is?  (I'm sure too-small is a problem, but I'm not sure where the threshold is.  In any case the relevant question for me is - is there such a thing as too large (other than hardware compatibility with my computer))

Not really. If it is big enough to fit the image it is good enough. However microSD cards with bigger size are usually a lot faster as well. I personally use and can recommend sandisk extreme (the golden ones) with either 32G or 64G capacity.

Too large is also possible since the SoCs may have a limit. So if your SD card is 2TB or something...try something a little smaller

 

1 hour ago, bsammon said:

Does it matter what size the card is?  (I'm sure too-small is a problem, but I'm not sure where the threshold is.  In any case the relevant question for me is - is there such a thing as too large (other than hardware compatibility with my computer))

 

 

it never occurred to me that I had to install any kind of dependency to use it. Strange.

Maybe there is another option available: https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager