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SD Card setup for ODROID-X

Posted on by neal.kim

To boot the ODROID-X/X2/U/U2, you need an SD card or eMMC module installed with a bootloader and a suitable Operating System.

Some ODROID kits will come with a ready-to-go card, but if you didn’t purchase one you will need to prepare your own:

Official images are available in this link.

Warning! When you write the ODROID image to your SD card you will lose all data that was on the card.

 

Copying the image to an SD Card on Windows

  1. Download a zipped image from this link or other mirrors
  2. Extract the image file .img or .odt from the zip file.
  3. Insert the SD card into your SD card reader and check what drive letter it was assigned. You can easily see the drive letter (for example G:) by looking in the left column of Windows Explorer. If the card is not new, you should format it; otherwise Win32DiskImager may hang.
  4. Download the Win32DiskImager utility. The download links are on the right hand side of the page, you want the binary zip.
  5. Extract the zip file and run the Win32DiskImager utility. You may need to run the utility as Administrator.
  6. Select the *.img image file you extracted earlier
  7. Select the drive letter of the SD card in the device box. Be careful to select the correct drive; if you get the wrong one you can destroy your computer’s hard disk!
  8. Click Write and wait for the write to complete.
  9. Exit the imager and eject the SD card.
  10. Insert the card in the ODROID, power it on, and it should boot up. Have fun!

 

Copying an image to the SD Card in Linux (command line)

Please note that the use of the “dd” tool can overwrite any partition of your machine. If you specify the wrong device in the instructions below you could delete your primary Linux partition. Please be careful.

  1. Download a zipped image from this link or other mirrors
  2. Extract the image, with (just an example)
    • unzip ~/OdroidX_image_31-Jul-2012.zip
  3. Run df -h to see what devices are currently mounted
  4. If your computer has a slot for SD cards, insert the card. If not, insert the card into an SD card reader, then connect the reader to your computer.
  5. Run df -h again. The device that wasn’t there last time is your SD card. The left column gives the device name of your SD card. It will be listed as something like “/dev/mmcblk0p1” or “/dev/sdd1”. The last part (“p1” or “1” respectively) is the partition number, but you want to write to the whole SD card, not just one partition, so you need to remove that part from the name (getting for example “/dev/mmcblk0” or “/dev/sdd”) as the device for the whole SD card. Note that the SD card can show up more than once in the output of df: in fact it will if you have previously written a ODROID image to this SD card, because the ODROID SD images have more than one partition.
  6. Now that you’ve noted what the device name is, you need to unmount it so that files can’t be read or written to the SD card while you are copying over the SD image. So run the command below, replacing “/dev/sdd1” with whatever your SD card’s device name is (including the partition number)
    • umount /dev/sdd1
    • Note that if you are not logged in as root you will need to prefix this with sudo
    • If your SD card shows up more than once in the output of df due to having multiple partitions on the SD card, you should unmount all of these partitions.
  7. In the terminal write the image to the card with this command, making sure you replace the input file if= argument with the path to your .img file, and the “/dev/sdd” in the output file of= argument with the right device name (this is very 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, sdd, not sdds1 or sddp1, or mmcblk0 not mmcblk0p1)
    • dd bs=1M if=ODROID-X_31_07_2012.img of=/dev/sdd
    • Note that if you are not logged in as root you will need to prefix this with sudo
    • The dd command does not give any information of its progress and so may appear to have frozen. It could take more than five minutes to finish writing to the card. If your card reader has an LED it may blink during the write process, or you can run pkill -USR1 -n -x dd in another terminal (prefixed with sudo if you are not logged in as root).
  8. As root run the command sync or if a normal user run sudo sync (this will ensure the write cache is flushed and that it is safe to unmount your SD card)
  9. Remove SD card from card reader, insert it in the ODROID, and have fun

Copying an image to the SD Card in Linux (graphical interface)

If you are using Ubuntu and hesitate to use the terminal, you can use the ImageWriter tool (nice graphical user interface) to write the .img file to the SD card.

  1. Download a zipped image from this link or other mirrors
  2. Right click the zip file and select “Extract here”
    • ATTENTION: As of this writing (15 June 2012), there is a bug in the ImageWriter program that causes it to fail if the filename of the image file or its path (i.e. all the names of any parent folders that you extract the image file into) contain any space characters. Before going any further, ensure that neither the file name of the image you’re using or the path contain any spaces (or other odd characters, for that matter). A bug has been opened for this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/usb-imagewriter/+bug/1013834 Once the issue is fixed, edit this page to advise people to use an updated/patched version of ImageWriter.
  3. Insert the SD card into your computer or connect the SD card reader with the SD card inside
  4. Install the ImageWriter tool from the Ubuntu Software Center
  5. Launch the ImageWriter tool (it needs your administrative password)
  6. Select the image file (example ODROID-X_31_07_2012.img) to be written to the SD card (note: because you started ImageWriter as administrator the starting point when selecting the image file is the administrator’s home folder so you need to change to your own home folder to select the image file)
  7. Select the target device to write the image to (your device will be something like “/dev/mmcblk0” or “/dev/sdc”)
  8. Click the “Write to device” button
  9. Wait for the process to finish and then insert the SD card in the ODROID

Manually resizing the SD card partitions (Optional)

The SD card image is sized for a 8GB card. The Fedora Remix will automatically resize the partitions on the card during the first boot. The Debian version won’t, so you’ll have to do it manually. It’s much easier if you do this on another machine, as the SD card can’t be mounted when you do this.

Look here for instructions.

Please note most of those instructions came from famouse RPi WiKi.

neal.kim