How to Update Firmware using a Mac!

[JDH]

**Check out punk machine’s recommendation here:https://videogameperfection.com/forums/topic/how-to-update-firmware-using-a-mac/#post-13621 before proceeding with this post**

Oh wow, tons of Windows users I see, but I have had success using this guide. For all us Mac users, you are no longer stuck using old firmware! I am no Terminal guru or anything, so anyone can do this. If you are using the OSSC, you will be successful to follow this guide 😉

Using this with 0.77 firmware and a generic eBay Sandisk 2GB MicroSD Card. Good luck!

https://www.udoo.org/docs/Getting_Started/Create_A_Bootable_MicroSD_card_for_UDOO_QUAD-DUAL.html

Don’t worry about it not being an .img file, it will work the same using the standard .bin

[BuckoA51]

Thanks for the tip!

[arovane]

Sorry but this doesn’t work. I succesfully updated firmware 0.73 some months ago (NOT using this technique though), but with 0.76 it doesn’t work, even though I’m using you’re technique. It always end up by the OSSC stating “invalid disk image”. Can someone please find an easy way for us mac user to update firmware?? I don’t like the idea of spending hours each month to install new updates. Thanks.

[arovane]

Or, I get “invalid argument” in the Terminal when trying to write disc image from bin on SD card. I get an error also with using the dd software. Nothing works so far.

[arovane]

OK it finally worked. The technique shown above is partly correct, but if you write in Terminal rdisk2 (or whatever number you have) it will not work. You have to put disk2, without the r. So something like this: sudo dd bs=1m if=/Users/nameofuser/Downloads/ossc_0.76.bin of=/dev/disk2
for some reason rdisk didn’t work with 0.76, which led me to multiple try and fail before I found the way to make it work.

[punkmachine]

Page had moved to here:
https://www.udoo.org/docs/Getting_Started/Create_A_Bootable_MicroSD_card_for_UDOO_QUAD-DUAL.html

[punkmachine]

I found an easier (and working!) alternative. Download a program called Etcher and use that to flash your sd card. You have to rename the file extension from .bin to .img otherwise it won’t work. Worked on the first try for me 🙂

[JDH]

Thanks for updating the link punkmachine. I updated OP, and let people know to check out your post as well.

[Digichan]

@punkmachine Thanks for the link to Etcher it really made things easy to creating an img SD card.

[michaelsft]

@punkmachine thanks for the tip but I am getting probably errors using Etcher – I downloaded the latest firmware, renamed it to img from bin but then I get an error message in Etcher:

‘It looks like this is not a bootable image…’

If I continue on the program writes to the image but then I get a mac error:

‘The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer’ – with the option to Initialise (which does nothing), Ignore or Eject.

I’m guessing it didn’t work or is it just that the OSSC will accept it, just not my mac now for some reason? Don’t want to try updating it with a borked image on the sd card!

@digichan – did you run into any issues at all?

[nmalinoski]

I’m pretty sure what you’re writing to the SD card is a raw binary image, not something with a filesystem that you can browse with a file explorer; otherwise, you’d just be formatting as something like FAT16 or FAT32 and extracting files from a zip archive to the SD card.

The OSSC looks for and verifies a checksum of the binary image, so, if it actually is corrupt when you try to do the firmware update, the OSSC won’t apply it.

[michaelsft]

Thanks mate, I tried it and it had worked after all – OSX still doesn’t recognise it but I guess that’s normal.

[djc6]

I was able to use balenaEtcher which is an open source utility to write the firmware image to an SD card. Available here: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

It wasn’t bootable or readable by the mac, but the card worked in the OSSC.

I also used the SD Memory Card Formatter tool from the SD Memory Card Association to do an Overwrite format of the card prior to writing image to it:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/

[apekop333]

I just succeeded in updating to 0.88a using https://www.balena.io/etcher/ Thanks for the tip djc6!
It was with a 64 GB Samsung EVO plus card. Worked first time. Win32 Disk Imager didn’t work for me in Parallels.

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