After writing the article on “How to get an Operating System on a SD-Card“, I realized that the existing methods and tools were not to my liking. Of course the existing tools are most certainly not bad and work just fine. I just didn’t like how they worked.
So instead of complaining, I decided to write my own program: The ApplePi-Baker 
…
This application is for MacOS X only and allows you to prepare an SD-Card for use with Raspberry Pi’s NOOBS, and it allows you to “flash” and IMG file to an SD-Card. ApplePi-Baker can now also be found on AlternativeTo.net and eLinux.org.
Note : This application is also very suitable for creating or restoring an IMG backup of USB drives!
Update : ApplePi-Baker v2 has been released, you can get it here.
The new version offers a lot options including shrinking and expanding of IMG’s, writing to multiple disks, a better speed and improved stability compared to the old version (1.x) mentioned in this article.
ApplePi-Baker – Overview
This is an outdated version: ApplePi-Baker v2 has been released!
The version of ApplePi-Baker in this article has been replaced with a completely new and overhauled version: ApplePi-Baker v2.
For MacOS X users that have read the article on “How to get an Operating System on a SD-Card“; there are several ways to flash an IMG file on an SD-card, or create NOOBS SD-cards.
None of these tools or methods were to my liking so I threw together an application that can do it the way I like it: The ApplePi-Baker.
Some key points:
- It’s FREE!
- Easy detection of the SD-Card device
- Quick creation of NOOBS disk
- Fast flashing of an IMG file to SD-Card
- Easy way to create an IMG backup of your SD-Card
See the Change Log for what has changed in several version.
Please like ApplePi-Baker at Alternative.to … 
Copyright, Pricing & Liability
It appears that stuff like this is needed, so before you start using ApplePi-Baker:
- This application is TOTALLY FREE! Nobody is to charge you a penny for it … and yes it’s copyrighted!
- You’re using the application at your own risk – so it can fry your computer and make your house implode …
- I created this application for MY OWN personal use – so keep in mind that I’m not your personal helpdesk.
TIP
Images previously created with “dd” are the same format as so called “.img” files.
A previously made “dd” image can be used, by simply adding the extension “.img”.
(Thanks John!)
Reporting issue … here!
Pretty please, when running into issues with ApplePi-Baker: Report them here!
I’ve seen, by accident, one or the other issue report in unrelated forums. Obviously I cannot address issue when they are not know to me, so please: report issues here.
Most recent version (recommended):
Download - ApplePi Baker (64 bit)
Download - ApplePi-Baker (32 bit)
Retina Support
As of version v1.73 (it might work with older versions as well), Retina support should work. Since the implementation by Apple depends on a few funny settings, you might have to execute the folllowing from a Terminal window:
defaults write com.tweaking4all.PiBaker AppleMagnifiedMode -bool no
Previous (non-SUDO) version:
Use this version in case you’re experiencing issues with your password (please report in the comment section below).
Download - ApplePi-Baker-1.5.1 (Outdated version - 32 bits)
Caution!!
This application can DESTROY ALL DATA on the selected drive – so pay attention to what you’re doing!
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ApplePi-Baker – Interface
The interface of ApplePi-Baker is straight forward (and yes I tried to be funny) …
You’ll find 4 “sections” in the ApplePi-Baker screen.
- Status bar
- Pi-Crust: Possible SD-Cards
- Pi-Ingredients: Build a NOOBS SD-Card
- Pi-Ingredients: Flash an IMG file to SD-Card
- Pi-in-the-Freezer – Make an SD-Card backup
Retina Users
For those that use a Mac with a Retina screen: Use Retinizer to make the application look better on a Retina screen (Thank Thorin for the tip!).
Unfortunately, at this time anyway, Lazarus Pascal still uses Carbon components, …
MacOS X ApplePi-Baker – User Interface
As of version 1.6, an Authentication window will appear at startup, which will ask your user password. This is the password you use when logging into your Mac and is needed for SUDO access. Rest assured, the password will not be saved and the password will not be used in command line statements (ie. remains invisible in process manager lists).
Per session the password will only be asked once. After restarting ApplePi-Baker, the password will be asked again.
As far as I know, this should work for every user, however the user should be member of the Admin user group (I believe this is done by default). Please report issues in the comments below.
ApplePi-Baker – New authentication window
Selecting your SD-Card
The “Pi-Crust: Possible SD-Cards” section shows a list of possible SD-Card devices. This can be a SD-Card in the card reader in your Mac or an USB-Card reader.
The device is indicated as the actual device name (i.e. /dev/disk1), including size (i.e. 16.6 Gb) and the protocol (USB or SD).
The list can be refreshed by clicking the refresh button (top right) and a selected device can be ejected by using the eject button (bottom right).
How to create a NOOBS SD-Card
After clicking the desired device, click the “Prep NOOBS Card” button in the “Pi-Ingredients: NOOBS recipe” section.
This will first erase the entire disk, create one single partition (MBR) and format it FAT-32 so it will be ready for NOOBS use.
More details about NOOBS can be found on the Raspberry website or in “How to get an Operating System on a SD-Card” article.
Simply put: unzip the NOOBS ZIP file and drag the files on the SD-Card and boot your Raspberry Pi with this SD-Card.
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How to flash an IMG to SD-Card
In the “Pi-Ingredients: IMG Recipe” section, one can flash an IMG file to your SD-Card.
Clicking the “IMG to SD-Card” button will open a dialog, asking you to select an IMG file or a compressed IMG file (ZIP, 7Zip, GZip).
If however you used the “…” button next to the “IMG file:” field, then no file dialog will appear and the file selected there will be used instead (practical if you’d like to flash the same image more than once).
The process for flashing an IMG is a little more complicated:
First the device will be totally erased and a single partition will be created (FAT-32/MBR).
After that the partition will be unmounted and the IMG file will overwrite the entire device (just like when you use “dd”).
Both speed and ETA will be indicated in the status bar.
How to create an IMG backup of your SD-Card
Creating an SD-Car backup is easy: simply select the device you’d like to backup, and click the “Backup SD-Card” button in the “Pi-in-the-Freezer” section.
This will create an IMG backup of your SD-Card with the option to Zip, GZip of 7Zip de IMG file on the fly.
Note that the filesize of the backup, no matter how much space you use on your SD-Card, will be exactly the size of the SD-Card.
Restoring such an IMG file might come with complications when the target SD-Card is not exactly the same sime (or bigger).
Both speed and ETA will be indicated in the status bar.
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As of version 1.6, an “Abort” button has been introduced, allowing you to abort/cancel any restore or backup process.
Be aware though that aborting a restore might leave you with a corrupted SD-card or USB-drive – repartitioning or restoring another image will make the card or drive useable as usual.
The button only appears when a process can be aborted.
ApplePi-Baker – New “Abort” button
Change Log ApplePi-Baker
Over time several things have changed with ApplePi-Baker, obviously.
It was originally just a little tool for myself, but it seems it has become quite popular even amongst non-Raspberry Pi users for flashing not just SD cards but also USB sticks.
Changes in v1.9.1:
– First of all, sorry for not keeping properly track here, seems I forgot to mention a few version
– Improved backup/restore specifically for larger SD cards
– Fixed bootable restore issues when restorin a NOOBS/Raspbian image
– Fixed bug with ZIP backup/restore
– Added activity indicator
Changes in v1.73:
– Hopefully, finally, resolved the freeze after entering the Sudo password
– Retina support
– Enabled making backups of read-only drives
Changes in v1.71 and v1.72:
– New great icon by Kray Mitchell – thanks again Kray for the excellent work!
– Addressed a minor bug in refreshing the device list
– Hopefull fixed the hanging ApplePi-Baker with some users when running under El Capitan
Changes in v1.7:
– Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) compatibility.
– Sudo password dialog improved (hidden password and entry handling).
– Better Media information (type and if it’s read-only or not).
Changes in v1.6:
– Compression for Restore and Backup on the fly (ZIP, 7ZIP and GZIP).
– “Abort” button to abort a restore or backup process.
– Authentication through SUDO instead of the Apple Security dialog (please report issues).
Changes in v1.5/v1.5.1:
– Compression of Backup IMG to a ZIP file (with progress-bar).
– Supports USB drives now as well.
– Compatible with other filesystems like ext3 or ext4.
Changes in v1.4:
– Bug fix (SD-card size)
– Speed improvement
Changes in v1.3:
– Minor bug fixed in detecting SD-Cards and SD-Card readers
– Cosmetic change: Window wide oriented
– Cosmetic change: All elements are now Retinizer compatible (use it to make it Retina style)
– Cosmetic change: Removed resizer icon (lower left corner)
Changes in v1.2:
– Fixed minor bug with USB SD-Card readers
– Changed “Look” a little bit
Changes in v1.1:
– Improved SD Card detection: detect weirdly partitioned SD-Card (after screwed up dd) properly
– Fixed error message after clicking “Write IMG to SD-Card” and not selecting a file
– Fixed random numbers in speed and ETA indication at startup of IMG writing
– Added filesize vs SD-Card size verification
– Added option to backup an SD-Card
Comments
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I tried to add a comment to your ApplePi-Baker but WP wouldn’t let me type into the comment field. Anyway, I love ApplePi-Baker. It’s a big time saver. Thanks!
Mike
Thanks Mike,
I’m not sure why WP refused your comment, anyhow I moved to the correct article.
…
Thanks for the positive feedback – I know the app is not rocket science, but it makes my life easier … glad it does for you as well
hans
Hi Just to post this some where – when I go to your link, attempt to download the app the ” freeware RAR App” triggers my virus protection software with the Genieo malware hack. Thought you should know that – so I am back to the old dd commands which work ok but you have to be in terminal mode …..
maybe i will try your app on a non-production Mac
thanks
John
john
Hi John,
I’m unaware of anything triggering a download of “freeware RAR App”, can you tell me where you found that?
I do not recall ApplePi-Baker using this since internally it uses 7zip?
(have not used it myself for about 4 months now due to traveling)
Please let me know where this occurs …
hans
Hi,
I tried this morning to install ApplePi-Backer. However my Norton virus checker warned me about the Genieo Virus. So you better have a look at it and double check this source.
It is too bad, I really would give this tool a try
Richard
Richard
Hi Richard,
Like John said:
One of the ads of Google appears misleading (something called “FreeRar”, displaying a big download button – which does not appear when I keep refreshing the page, so if you have the link, then please let me know so I can have Google block it).
ApplePi-Baker itself is virus free, and can be found in the very large green download boxes above … I only provide downloads directly from my own servers (v1.6 can be downloaded here, and v1.5 can be downloaded here – These are the same links as offered in the large green boxes).
In case you ran into the misleading Google ad, then I apologize for the confusion …
hans
Hello,
Just download and use ApplePi Baker. Love it so much. Thanks. It’s outstanding from others.
Could it support Retina-display in next version? The current display is too low to display correctly on Retina-display (screenshot here: http://bit.ly/1crpLNi).
Thorin
Hi Thorin,
Nice to hear that you like it, thank you for letting me know …
As for Retina support: Yeah, I’d love to, but I’ve developed this app with Lazarus Free Pascal, which doesn’t support Cocoa natively yet (needed for Retina) and still relies on Carbon
… as soon as Cocoa is support I will release a Retina version (I have a Retina Macbook pro so I’d benefit from it myself as well).
Thanks again!
hans
It’s nice to know that you got a plan with Retina display. Your app, again, is very stable, reliable and hit the nail on the head. I have just found out there’s an app named Retinizer for better display with ApplePi-Baker. You can try it here: http://retinizer.mikelpr.com. It can help a little bit while we’re waiting for Cocoa.
One more suggestion, I realized that the height of the app is much longer than the width, and we cannot adjust it. It’s not proportionate at all (on our screen display, the width is longer than the heigh, right?). It’s just my suggestion, and it’s still your call.
Because I love your app, thus I always wanna it better.
Thorin
I had never heard of Retinizer … interesting App, but it seems that it doesn’t modify the binary, just on a per user level?
I’ll have to play with it a little bit. But it’s most certainly a good tip for other users.
I do like you suggestion, so I’m taking note of your request to make the app wider, so everything appears a bit more proportion.
Depending on when Cocoa support will be available for Lazarus, I’ll modify the interface at the same time or before Cocoa is supported.
Thanks again!
hans
Thank you so much!
Thorin
Check it out Thorin …
…
Per you suggestions:
Made the app wider, and I replaced the components that didn’t work well with Retinizer … (except for the logo image).
Hope you like it … Enjoy!
(and don’t forget sharing the link
)
hans
Ooohh, it’s so cool dude. Really awesome. Everything seems to be perfect with proportion and works well with Retinizer. Very appriciated your effort thus far. I’m very willing to share this. Thank you.
Thorin
Glad you like it
… thanks again for the kind words and good tips!
hans
ApplePi-Baker v1.3 available.
hans
Hi Hans!
Very nice works! It works without problems!
Only one thing tha probably is a little bug(little!!)
When I make a SD backup and try to restore it (on the same SD) an alert appear and it say that the img size is a bit bigger than SD size! If I chose “continue” the restore is successfull…
Any explanation?? Thank you for great work!!
Pierluigi
Hi Pierluigi!
Glad it works well for you as well …
As far as the image goes: it uses “dd” to make an image of the entire SD card.
The fine details why an image might be a few bytes bigger than the size of the original SD card is a mystery to me as well.
I’ll have to look into that, it might also be a “rounding” error.
hans
Thank you for your ultra-fast reply!!
And thank you for your support!
Hope you will investigate! I will stay tuned!!
Have a nude day!
Pierluigi
I just released v1.4 – it should address the problem you ran into.
hans
Thanks a lot!!
I will try it tomorrow! (Now i’m in other city!)
Ps naturally my previous post was: “Have a nice day!”
Sorry for bad typing!!
Thank you again!
Pierluigi
Haha
… yeah I figured you wanted to say “nice” … couldn’t help laughing about it .
hans
Yess !
many thanks, it has worked for me (for kano)
regards,
Fred
FredP
Thanks for the positive feedback Fred – much appreciated!
hans
Thanks Random_Robbie for the review (link)!
hans
Many many thanks for this app – I couldn’t get PiWriter 1 or 2 to work, but this did the trick – saved me hours of frustration!
Stephen Lord
Thanks Stephen! Glad to see that other enjoy my little app as well
hans
Thanks for this, it worked like a charm!
Craig Nakamoto
Thank you very much for the positive feedback Craig!
hans
Hi all from France,
Many thanks for this app, it works perfectly ;-)
Masci
Hi Masci!
Thanks for leaving a nice comment, much appreciated!
hans
Thank you so much! The app is great!
Jacob Gelman
Thanks Jacob! Appreciate the great feedback!
hans
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[…] ApplePi Baker nos mostrará el progreso de la grabación (o de la copia de seguridad) en una barra de estado. Es gratuito y puedes descargarlo desde aquí. […]
Perfect perfect thank you so much !!!
RvdBos
Thank you very much for the positive feedback!
hans
Considering that I just made this app for personal use:
Thank you everybody for your interest … that’s awesome: over 4,200 downloads already (total = English + Dutch pages)!!!
hans
It’s not working (Mac Mini 2012 i7, 16 GB Ram, 8 Core) with newest Mavericks. After Partition sequence I’ve seen a Popup with a Security warning to enter the admin passwort. After 1 seconds #Ve entered the password the app is writing “done”. But nothing is written (8 GB SDCard, Avaliable Space: 7.96 GB).
How I can solve that?
Justus
Hi Justus,
I (and a lot of others) am running this app under Mavericks (10.9.2 on a MBP Retina [i7 Quad core], a regular MBP [i7 Quad core], and a Mac Pro [2x Xeon Quad core]) as well without a problem, which is of course not helping your situation.
Are you sure you’re entering the right password (caps lock etc)?
I know it’s a trivial (and often annoying) question, but the response of the app makes me think that your password was not sufficient for sudo (root) access.
hans
I too am having the same problem as Justus. I was able to back the current .img I had on my Pi 8Gb SD card but when I selected a new .img to test it ask for admin password (yes I entered in correctly) then is goes to done/complete a few secs after that and it did nothing. I also tried the prepare to format it and it does the same thing. Asks for password and is done really quick and it never formatted the SD. Using a 13″ MacBook w/ 10.9.2.
Sully
So I purchased a new SD Card and also rebooted my MacBook Pro and now it’s working just great “baking” .img files to the SD card. Maybe a funky SD card maybe the Mac just needed a good ol’ reboot. Thanks for making some great software though! Keep up the great work.
Sully
Thanks Sully for the positive feedback and I’m glad it now works.
hans
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I don’t have a mac and all, but the bit that states
“You’re using the application at your own risk – so it can fry your computer and make your house implode …”
was probably the best thing i have ever read and laughed at
jake
Hehe
… thanks Jake! I’m glad it made you laugh, …
Got to have some humor, even with “serious” topics, right?
hans
[…] the default install to the SD card is really hard on the mac. I discovered Apple Pi which makes it super easy. It even allows you to install the media server XBMC to use the Pi with […]
Version 1.4 has been released today, addressing a minor issue with calculating SD-card size and IMG size.
A minor speed improvement has been added as well.
hans
I’m guy that suggested you some UI features (Retinizer compatible, horizontal view…) in version 1.3. Noticed that version 1.4 has been fixed some problems about clone and restore SD card image. Couldn’t more excited every time ApplePi Baker has it own update.
Just one more recommendation, could it clone/backup SD card without empty space? Indeed we don’t use whole space of SD Cards. Currently, I’m using about 3.5GB/7.9GB, and “backup SD card without empty space” can help us restore SD images to different types of SD card, and of course, save more space for hard disk.
Thank you!
Thorin Pham
Thanks for the compliment Thorin
…
Cloning without the empty space is a little tricky. There are 2 scenario’s:
– The partition is 100% of the SD-Card but only part of the partition is used
– The partition is only using part of the SD-Card
In the first case, it’s had to determine what is being used and what not, and to clone it one would need to resize the partition.
In the second case, it will be a challenge to image the SD-Card and keep it bootable for the Raspberry Pi.
The base of ApplePi-Baker is utilizing “dd” which does not offer any means to either.
An external program like Gparted would be needed to resize the partition down to it’s minimum size.
I’ll look into this and see what I can come up with, but I’m afraid it’s more complicated than one would hope it would be …
Ideally, one would like to image only the actual data and offer the option to use the entire SD-Card when restoring. Right now I do not have the mean to do so.
hans
When you boot an image for the first time it will load the raspi-config screen, and give you the option to expand file system. Thats what I do. If not, then apt-get install raspi-config, and then run raspi-config, the second option down is expand filesystem…..
Cheers!
Sashmo
http://cagewebdev.com/index.php/raspberry-pi-expanding-the-root-partition-of-the-sd-card/
Link for reference….
S
Sashmo
Thanks Sashmo,
But that would be for expanding a partition only?
I think Thorin meant: you have an existing partition (not 100% full) or a partition that doesn’t use the entire SD card. Instead of imaging the entire SD: first make the partition as small as possible and only image that (or image first and resize the IMG) … the suggested raspi-config can expand that IMG to use the entire SD.
hans
You got me, Hans.
Anw, thanks for your guideline, Sashmo.
Thorin Pham
I’ve been digging for a solution for this request – after all, it would be great to save the minimal needed amount of data. Not just so it fits on a different size SD-card but also to save disk space when storing it somewhere for later use.
When I looked for a solution to minimize the size of a partition (ext2/3/4), then the first problem we’d run into is that MacOS X does not support any of these filesystems. So resizing requires either Linux or a filesystem “driver” for any of the ext formats (there are a few out there like MacFuse and Paragon ExtFS), which is not something I can assume a user to have on their Mac.
So for now I do not see a universal solution for this.
I’ll keep looking for options where not the entire SD-Card is being used (ie. the sum of the partition is not equal to the capacity of the SD-Card).
hans
MacFuse or Paragon ExtFS could be a temporary option for those who want to save the minimal needed amount of data. Thank you for your works to community, Hans!
Thorin Pham
Thanks Thorin
…
I’ll keep my eyes open for workable solution … (after all: I’m interested in this myself as well)
hans
Fast and simple !!
Thanks a lot,
Mazza
Mazza
Thanks Mazza … glad you like it!
hans
I got a chance to put your ApplePi-Baker to work the past few days and it worked great. For me, it is a lot faster than using PiWriter and PiCloner. Those have worked for a long time so I was glad to have them, but ApplePi-Baker is much faster.
There are two feature requests I’ll offer. One is to reduce the disk image size. The other is to compress the image. I’ve been doing both of these with the Pi lately. PiCloner does this on the Mac, so it can be done, but it’s easy to do on the pi and there’s a perl script that runs on the Pi to reduce the image size, so I do those both there. I know the script calls some linux tools to do this (gparted?) so it doesn’t run on the Mac, but perhaps that can be worked around. There’s a thread on the Pi forums for this script here: resizeimage.pl
Those would be nice, but mostly I came to say “Thank You”. You’ve crafted a really cool toolset here and I do appreciate the work you’ve done.
William Stephenson
Thank you William for the kind words – it’s very much appreciated.
I guess compressing an image would not be too hard to implement – so I’ll add it to the “To do” list
.
Reducing disk image size might be little trickier, but I’m very interested in this myself. GPartEd is indeed only for Linux. I’d rather build something that doesn’t require any special tools (unless I can include the binary in the ApplePi-Baker package). I think the main issue is the filesystem used by the Raspberry Pi images … MacOS X doesn’t support most of them (EXT2,3,4), so that adds an extra complication. I’m keeping my eyes open though.
Thanks for the suggestions!
hans
Hi Hans, many thanks also from me for this nifty little tool! As William stated before, image-compression would be highly appreciated.
Another suggestion is to support usb-stick installations (eg. Raspbmc) with no FAT32 partition – as these usb-drive are not shown up in the finder (because of it’s only ext-partition), they also do not show up in the Apple-Pi Baker. Maybe you can manage to recognize these drives as well… the dd command does work, but it is awfully slow and has no progression bar ;)
Many thanks again and best regards, Zumo.
PS: As Mike from the first post, I was also not able to write into the text-field with Firefox, I had to switch to Safari.
Zumo
Hi Zumo,
thanks for the positive feedback.
I’ll add image compression to the “to do” list, and maybe I can add a checkbox to show “all” drives instead of only the SD cards, for advanced users.
Thanks also for the FireFox note – I’ll have to check that out, since it used to work
…
hans
Give version 1.5 a try
hans
Just release v1.5 …
This new release allows ZIP compression of the IMG file after creating a backup.
This release will now also recognize USB sticks or SD-Cards that are not formatted in a format recognized by your Mac – for example ext3 or ext4, and will be able to make a backup of that as well.
hans
Hi Hans, thank you very much for this quick release of version 1.5! The ext3 formated USB stick is recognized and backed up flawlessly. Also the zipping works, but it is a little bit awkward to see the app with the rainbow-ball as frozen. Maybe in a further release a progress-bar will be added? ;)
It’s so nice to get rid of the dd command :)
Zumo
You’re welcome Zumo!
Glad to hear it all works as expected!
…
Yeah the beach ball is not a great way to show “progress” … I’ll have to look into a way of tracking progress, but that would have taken much more time. It’s on the “todo” list
hans
v.1.5.1 released today … this minor version adds a progress bar to v1.5 when zipping a backup of a SD-Card or USB drive.
hans
Great!
Zumo
Hello Hans,
The backup file compressing feature is really useful. It helps me save a ton of my SSD space. How about the feature of writing image to SD card without decompressing the backup file? It means we can choose the .ZIP file along with the .IMG file when writing image to SD card. So far, I have to unzip manually before choose IMG file.
Thanks
Thorin Pham
Hi Thorin,
I was thinking the exact same thing, however …
Internally I use “dd” and “zip”.
For making a backup I had the idea to pipe dd output straight to zip, or
for doing a restore pipe the zip output straight to dd.
From the command line this works, however … I’d loose the ability to track progress
…
When using an internal ZIP option, the zip and unzip time increases dramatically (app. 400%), so I don’t consider that an option either …
I’m still looking into this though …
hans
Thanks for all your efforts to improve the app :)
Thorin Pham
You’re welcome
…
hans
OMG LOVEIT SO MUCH IT IS SO GOOD =)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)=)
Arya
Thanks Arya
hans
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Thanks so much for this tool, very awesome and easy to use.
Would love to see an option to Backup using rsync so I can backup incrementally when changes are made. This would also allow me to have a local copy that I could put into a repo to monitor and fork changes for development and testing.
Raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/5427/can-a-raspberry-pi-be-used-to-create-a-backup-of-itself
Not sure if it’s possible, but it’s a bit past my terminal abilities to achieve on my own.
Regardless, keep up the great work!
Kray Mitchell
Hi Kray – seems your comment accidentally ended up in spam, so I reposted it.
Thank you for the compliments and the suggestion. I’ll read the article you linked to and see what I can do with that. Seems to me though that this would require an OS that can read ext3/ext4 filesystems and the Mac (natively) cannot do this. Doesn’t mean I won’t explore it though
… would love to find alternative methods, for example only the files and not the entire disk (such a waste of space).
Right now I’m working on a new version that allows Zip, 7z and GZip to be used for backup and restore, all in one move.
hans
No problem! This raunchy solution looks ideal, though again, above my terminal comfort level lol.
As OSX is Linux based, wouldn’t it be able to support that?
Not very in depth at file systems either, so… Lol.
Was also thinking about using Parallels to setup a Debian OS on to deal with stuff like this.
Thanks again for the awesome tool. Do you accept paypal donations?
Kray Mitchell
Hi Kray!
I think MacOSX is FreeBSD based “to be precise” haha … anyhow, nope it does not support any of the EXT filesystems
…
I am however considering making a Linux version of ApplePi-Baker, just not quite sure yet how far I want both version to be different. Maybe later I’ll toy with some additional filesystems through FUSE and such, but I kind-a hate to have tell users to install this, that and the other thing. I really prefer single package solutions … but I will look into the options …
PayPal donations: Yes I do. Not sure if this PayPal link works but otherwise there is a button in the upper left corner of this page.
Thank you for asking!
p.s. I use the latest versions of both VMWare Fusion and Parallels. I suspect Parallels might be tad faster (startup/shutdown) but has this annoying habit of “integrating” into my Mac environment when I use Coherence … it’s even so bad that files which I usually open with an existing Mac Application, by double clicking, are not automatically opening with a Windows application. There seems no way to disable this “feature” unless you’re not using coherence. Probably the last version of Parallels that I will purchase …
hans
Thanks Hans,
I don’t mind installing extras for certain features if needed. I was actually thinking about purchasing ExtFS (http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/) to ‘bridge the gap’ as they say LOL. My buddy knows more about Linux than me, so was going to have him check it out.
Never had that issue with Parallels, but I also don’t use it heavily. I did some of my own tests for VM vs P and I found that Parallels just ran faster all the way around for me. Mostly web testing stuff though, so again, no heavy use.
Totally missed the link at the top LOL thanks!
Keep up the great work!
Kray Mitchell
Hi Kray,
thank you for your very generous donation …
You’ve made my day!
I’m toying with an idea that could potentially shrink images significantly, but that’s when ApplePi-Baker hits v2 – I just finished compression and decompression on the fly, which I’m testing right now (supports ZIP, 7Zip, GZip) and seems to work very well. I hope to release that version either today or tomorrow.
After that I’ll be working on my idea, which will be a much more complex to build and test, but I’ll keep you posted!
hans
Can’t wait to check out V2! And no worries, thanks for the great product!
Kray Mitchell
Thanks Kray!
People like you keep me motivated
…
hans
Hi,
I’d like to give you some money via paypal.
Could you put a paypal link sticky at the top next to your bitcoin and amazon payments?
The link in this thread doesn’t work anymore.
Thanks,
Sean
sean reynolds
Hi Sean,
Thank you very much Sean! It’s always very much appreciated to see a small token of appreciation … and yes, unfortunately PayPal decided that I’m not allowed to offer a donate link on my website. Without any notice they pulled the plug. You can still donate to this email address though: hans at luijten dot net. Please mention ApplePi-Baker (not Tweaking4All).
Thank you again!
hans
[…] Use an app to image that downloaded .img file onto an SD card. I use ApplePi-Baker on my MacBook Pro to image it, or you can use DD. Windows users can use Win32 Disk […]
Released today: Version 1.6.
This version allows reading/writing of ZIP, 7Zip and GZ(ip) files, even the ones not created by ApplePi-Baker.
In this version an “Abort” button has been added and the Authentication method has changed (needed SUDO access for compression).
Please report any issues here …
hans
Hi Hans,
1. Password Visible choice should be saved next time you open the app.
2. This screenshot is showing how the app layout on the whole screen of my Macbook after submit (press OK) password. Look at the right side. It should be centered or somewhere that the app windows can show entirely.
3. When press Cancel on Admin password panel, I’m supposed that it should be quit the app immediately instead of asking 2 times (showing 2 alert windows after that) and opening the app.
Still not testing the feature of reading/writing of ZIP, 7Zip and GZ(ip) files yet.
Thanks Hans for continuously updating
Thorin Pham
Hi Thorin,
thank you very much for the very quick feedback – it’s much appreciated!
1. Saving a root/sudo password is considered bad practice and frowned upon.
But I’ll consider adding a checkbox, something like “Save for next time”, so users can check this if they are comfortable with that.
2. Screen position: Thanks for the screenshot, I agree, the app should have been centered in the screen. Right now it let’s your Mac decide, but I’ll definitly change that in the next (minor) update.
3. Quitting the app after clicking the Cancel button is what I originally had, but wasn’t quite sure how happy people would be with that. I’ll add it to the next update.
Please let us know how Zip etc works for you.
I’ve found that 7Zip is the most efficient format and performs actually pretty good. GZip and Zip perform OK, but compared to 7Zip I’d even call it “poor”. 7Zip seems to compress a lot better.
hans
I think Thorin talked about the visibility checkbox in point 1, not about saving the password. It would be nice if the visibility of the password is off by default, instead of on. Is it possible to change that?
Other than that, thanks for the nice tool!
Jelle
Thanks Jelle!
Yeah, I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that haha.
The idea I want to implement is default password NOT visible – I’m in the middle of moving from the US to the Netherlands, so it will take a while before I can make these modifications.
Thanks for the compliment
hans
I also requested that feature. Been wondering when. Thanks for letting us know what’s up. Hope you (and your family?) have a safe move!
EkDor
Thanks Ekdor!
Yeah the last 9 months have been chaotic – I’ve spent time back and forth in the Netherlands, the US, Belgium and Germany.
I hope within a few weeks everything will settle, but I know shipping my stuff alone will take at least 4 weeks.
Can’t wait to have a normal life again haha.
hans
Sounds good. I could pick it up myself if you’d like some help on this change.
Another feature request: detect if the SD is read-only. My micro-sd adapter seems to have a glitch that the switch goes to read-only, but the pi-baker doesn’t know about that.
Have fun moving. If you need help let me know!
Jelle
Hi Jelle!
Yes, trying to detect if the SD is Read-Only is a feature I have been thinking about as well – it’s on the To-Do list
.
My micro SD adapter has the same issue; half the time I insert it into my MBP it will go to locked.
Thanks for offering to help move!
And feel free to come help – it’s a lot of work moving this way …
hans
Hi Hans,
I work as a normal user without admin-rights. For me it is not possible to to bake my pi with 1.6. The security dialog box worked for me because I was able to execute tasks like formatting with the rights of an admin.
Nevertheless a great app and thanks for your work. I stick with 1.5.1.
Robert
Robert
Thanks for the feedback Robert
…
I was already afraid that would happen. I will try to see if I can come up with a better solution …
I’m not all that crazy about the current method …
hans
I’ve not tried your app myself (don’t have a Mac!) but I guess you probably want to change your Raspberry.org link to RaspberryPi.org
AndrewS
Oh wow,… that’s stupid of me … nice catch!!!
I’ll make sure that the next version has RaspberryPi.Org … man I’m ashamed that I missed that one …!
Good thing that it at least links to RaspberryPi.org …
Thanks!
hans
[…] http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ Mac OS X Nutzern empfehle ich außerdem dieses Programm: ApplePiBaker. Damit lässt sich mit ein paar Klicks die SD-Karte startbereit machen. Für Windows-User: Hier ist […]
Great (German) article on printing with AirPrint by using a Raspberry Pi!!
hans
Yep Hans, slick and fun app!
Wouldn’t have the first idea what dd is and what to do with code lines, so I was glad your app made image restore to USB stick easy as pie!
Thanks again!
Jan
Funny to see how smart people know how to use their tools.
ApplePi-Baker was never intended for this purpose, but it works just fine for it!
Finally found my 1st gen AppleTV – had it already packed in a box (I’ll be moving in the near future), so I’ll try to write a new article based on the image files.
hans
Where’s version 1.6? No matter what they say, all the download links — both on the ApplePi-Baker Update page AND the Downloads page itself — are downloading the same file for Mac OS X. Which is “v0.1” dated January 13, 2014. I cannot for the LIFE of me find a download link that actually gets me v1.6. Any help would be appreciated.
Ken Gruberman
Hi Ken,
I’m sorry to hear you’re experiencing download issues.
I’m not sure what is going wrong though …?
I just clicked the first link, to verify, but this correctly downloads v1.6 (this is the same link, filename “ApplePi-Baker.zip”).
Maybe your browser or proxy (work, school?) has cached an old version?
Can you try another browser or another Internet connection?
hans
I can also confirm this.
While the app launches and says 1.6, viewing the app in the Applications folder shows the app at v0.1
Also shows created date of Jan 13, 2014
Showed this with version 1.3 and after I upgraded to 1.6 as well.
Screenshot of freshly downloaded 1.6: http://imgur.com/nqoKY3u
Kray Mitchell
Wow.!!
What a great utility.
Thanks, Andrew
Andrew Smallridge
Thanks Andrew!
Very much appreciate you taking the effort letting me know!
Spread the word …
hans
Thanks for creating a damn practical application Hans!
Much appreciated!
John
[…] de USB Drive correct (gebruik de eject knop in ApplePi-Baker, naast de drive list) en ga verder met Stap 3 […]
Still waiting for next update version :D
Thorin Pham
Thanks for the reminder!
Sorry – got buried in other responsibilities … I’ll try to have a new version available by next week …
hans
[…] ApplePi Baker App für Mac OS X […]
Thank you for this neat piece of software…. :)
Menno
Thanks Menno for the positive feedback – always very much appreciated!
hans
[…] Descargar | ApplePi Baker […]
[…] Descargar | ApplePi Baker […]
[…] Más información | Pulsa aquí […]
I am not able to restore a previously made backup. The program gets stuck in the “Baking IMG recipe” process.
I am moving from a smaller SD (1gb) to a bigger one (32gb). The .zip file with the backup gives me a .cpgz when I try to unzip it via the builtin image archiver OSX Mavericks.
Any suggestion on how to restore it?
Niko
Hi Niko,
Did you create the .ZIP file with Apple-Pi Baker?
Also note that with the latest Apple-Pi Baker, unzipping is no longer needed.
Another “issue” with zip is that when a zip file is created from the standard input, that it will give it no name or a weird name. Unzipping that afterwards will result in some weird filenames.
Is this “hanging” happening with other SD cards as well?
And is it happening with other images as well?
Silly, I know, but make sure the SD-Card is unlocked (happens to me every now and then when I insert an SD card that the side of the slot hits the little “lock” slider and effectively sets the card to read only)?
hans
What a GREAT tool! Thank you for making it simple and clear what the user is doing at the time … with feedback from the interface too!
No more wondering “if” dd is done.
Dan
Thanks Dan!
I very much appreciate that you took the time to post a positive feedback! Keeps me motivated
…
hans
[…] http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ Mac OS X Nutzern empfehle ich außerdem dieses Programm: ApplePiBaker. Damit lässt sich mit ein paar Klicks die SD-Karte startbereit machen. Für Windows-User: Hier ist […]
Hi,
I just wanted to say THANK YOU for this fantastic utility. People like you make the world a better place ;)
Regards,
David.
David Griffith
Thank you David!
It’s users like you that make it worthwhile to spend time on developing apps like these.
Thanks you again!
hans
Hans, I’m still waiting for the newer version :)
Thorin Pham
Thanks for the reminder Thorin
…
I’m enjoying a trip to my family in Europe and will be there for at least another month. As soon as I get back, I’ll be finishing one small project (Boblight Config Maker) and then Apple-Pi Baker will be addressed … sorry for the delay.
If I manage to implement some of my new ideas, then the new version will take a bit of time to build.
hans
It seems the current version doesn’t work with Mac OS Yosemite 10.0 DP7
The app can open but it freezes when you restore image (screenshot: http://bit.ly/1ms7lGU).
Anyone can confirm?
Btw, have a nice trip in Europe, Hans.
Thorin Pham
Thanks Thorin!
I will try to test it on my Mac (10.10 as well) and see if it works.
That might happen today or tomorrow – as soon as I can find an SD card or USB stick.
hans
[…] you use a mac then get ApplePi Baker to burn the IMG […]
I’m trying to figure out how to clone or otherwise backup a running Raspberry Pi SD. I need to do regular, scheduled backups of running SD’s on about 125 Pi’s to preferably another volume on the network or local to the Mac I would have on the network dedicated to this task, as an image file or whatever is practical. Am I on a snipe hunt?
Thanks,
H Nolan
H Nolan
Hi H Nolan,
I’m not sure if this would work, but it’s worth a try:
– Create a script which uses “dd” to create an image file of the SD
– Store the image file directly on a network share
– Add the script to your Cron
You’d need a SMB of NFS mounted on each of the Pi’s. You do not want to write the “dd” output to the SD card obviously since “dd” is reading the disk when creating an image.
My experience with Linux is a little limited so no guarantees that this will be 100% working, but worth a try.
Once you have one Pi running this way, then it’s just a matter of copying the script to all the 125 Pi’s (That’s a LOT of Pi’s!) …
hans
[…] Simple y efectivo. La aplicación la podéis descargar de la página Tweaking4All.com […]
I’m having issues with the SUDO password entry – installed the latest version of the software, input my password, even with it set to be visible, and I am 100% sure it is correct, and it is saying ‘Incorrect password”. Definitely the right password, and I’m definitely an admin account. Any ideas?
IanW
The password is used directly in SUDO shell statements. Maybe you’d like to try opening the Terminal and test something like:
Which should ask the password and show a file listing when entered correctly.
What might also cause issues is passwords with unusual characters (like quotes, space, ampersand etc).
As you might have read: the current password request method is far from what I like (hence the reference to the previous version). I’ll need to make some more time to revamp that part, as soon as I can find some time to do so …
hans
Can I just say, that’s the best and most easiest way yet to install random iso .img’s to SD card. Had all sorts of trouble. My advice, add a price tag.
Adam
Thanks Adam!
I’ve considered adding a price tag, but I want to keep it fun for myself as well. Adding a price tag makes me feel obligated to update and modify based on user requests which kind-a takes the fun out of it. But maybe one day I’ll add a tiny price tag since donations are rare …
Glad you like the app though! Good to hear …
hans
Love this application for my custom software. Problem is if I have a computer without a password, how do I get pass the authentication requirement?
llancit
Hi llancit,
Every Mac has a password.
However, some Mac’s are setup to automatically login.
During the setup process of your Mac you had to provide a password for this, this is always the case, and this is the password needed for ApplePi-Baker.
hans
I have a password that I use every time I start my computer but it will not accept it. I am second owner of this computer so I did not do the original set up.
umpqua john
Hi Umpqua John,
Oh I see the problem there yes. Well a few options:
1) Try to get the orignal admin password that was used to install the Mac.
2) Do a full recovery instead, erasing your current setup.
3) Version 1.6 does not seem to work on all systems, revert to version 1.5.1.
I hope to develop a new version in the next weeks that supports the method of v1.5.x instead of the silly method I’ve used in v1.60.
hans
Hi,
Thanks for writing this app!
I am having an issue with the sudo version. I’m running 10.7.5 and PiBaker turns to not responding in activity monitor. It’s got a sudo child process, which has a child process ps. However they are using basically no memory or CPU.
Adrian Beale
I will look into creating a new version – for now please revert to the previous (non-sudo) version.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
hans
Same here, OS X Yosemite 10.10.4
Jamie
I have noticed that this typically happens when the SD card is “locked”.
I have this very often when working with micro SD cards. The flimsy adapter I have slides to locked 9 out of 10 times when inserting it in the SD card reader.
In a next version I’ll try to add “Read Only” detection so you see right away that something is wrong.
hans
I noticed that when I insert a “locked” card, with the intent of creating a back-up of it, it’s read-only status is reported in Pi-Baker, and the option to Create Backup in the Pi-in-the-Freezer section of the app is grayed out and unavailable. While I am able to switch the card lock switch off and then take a backup of it, and it seems to work, I just wanted to recommend that the Create Backup should still be available, even though the card is “read-only.” As a first time user, I would have really liked to leave the card locked. That being said, everything else worked as expected and this was a huge time saver for me. Thanks Hans!
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
thanks for noticing I was aware of this “issue”. For some reason the backup does not seem to work when the SD card is read-only, so until I have figured out what is causing this, I kept the backup button disabled for read-only drives.
I agree with the user experience … backup after all should be only reading … so Read-Only should not be an issue …
hans
Thanks so much !!! This was a big time saver, I only have MAC OS at home.
James Mason
Glad to hear that! Thanks James!
hans
This is great! Thanks! I’ve used it for Raspberry Pi and also for Cubox distributions. It’d be cool if it also supported .xz compressed files (for those cubox distros), but that’s a pretty minor niggle.
Doug
Thanks Doug!
Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with the .xz compression so I had to look it up. Considering that this will be considered the replacement of bzip2, I’ll do an effort to include this as well in a future release (in which I’d like to address some other small issues). As soon as I get back home, I’ll take a peek (which should be mid December).
Did you find a way to [de]compress xz under MacOS X?
hans
I used
to install a utility named unxz that lets me do it. It’s from here: http://tukaani.org/xz/
Doug
Crap … I didn’t realize you’d have to use brew for this. I try to aim for an all-in-one package, so I’ll have to see if I can use the xz binary without the need for any other brew components …
hans
All of the XZ software (at Doug’s link) is licensed to the public domain, so you’re free to statically link liblzma into your app.
AndrewS
I’ll look into that! I’m not familiar with the lib, but it might support more than just XZ … which means I could use it for other compression formats as well. I’ll have to dig into that one …
hans
any luck with the support of Yosemite?
marciton
Not yet – I’m traveling so I do not have access to my source codes …
I’ll do some more testing with the app on my laptop, but I cannot rewrite any code at the moment …
hans
I just used it in Yosemite. It works fine.
Wolf
Thanks Wolf!
Did either of you upgrade from a previous MacOS X version or use a fresh install?
hans
I did a simple upgrade from Mavericks.
Wolf
Same here. Even ran the public beta … just updated 10.8 -> 10.9 -> 10.10 beta’s -> 10.10.
@Marciton: Did you update or fresh install?
hans
Thanks for this great piece of software, Hans. Very helpful!
Wolf
Thanks Wolf!
Always great to get positive feedback!
hans
[…] and the Raspberry PI disk-image writer for OS X was written in freepascal, you can download that here (much easier than the guide on the […]
[…] //www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/ […]
Hello Hans, it took the liberty to mention you here: https://tathros.squarespace.com/blog/2014/10/24/how-to-build-a-digital-picture-frame-with-a-raspberry-pi
Wolf
Hi Wolf!
Thanks for mentioning ApplePi-Baker – nice little project by the way! I might follow your example!
hans
FYI
Used your program successful on my macbook pro before upgrading to 10.10. After that it hangs.
Most likely the OS it self since a lot of other things are not working the way it should.
Michael
Michael Copini
Hi Michael,
thank you for reporting this – one other user reported issues as well, even though other Yosemite users appear to be having no problems.
Did you upgrade to 10.10 or did you do a fresh install?
Have you tested both versions? (v1.5.1 and v1.6)
I’m traveling right now, so I will not be able to work on this until I get back (mid December).
hans
Hello,
Having the same issue with 1.6 and Yosemite, I tried 1.5.1 and it’s working fine :)
The program hands on a macbook air and a mac mini.
Paul.
Mobyone
I think I’ll scrap 1.6 pretty soon and hope to find a good workable alternative (1.7?). For quite a lot of people 1.6 works just fine, but enough other users seem to run into authentication issues.
Thanks for reporting the details! This helps finding the culprit!
hans
[…] ApplePi Baker ist zu eben diesem Zweck programmiert worden. Ich nutze es regelmäßig, da es bei mir (zumindest unter OS X Yosemite) bisher am besten funktioniert. […]
Hey –
downloaded this and but it will not accept my “Admin Password.”
I am an Admin. I’ve tried everything. I even logged in as root and tried from there but still wont work.
Thoughts?
Rich
Hi Rich,
sorry to hear it’s not working for you. What version did you tey? 1.6 or 1.5.1?
(they use different authentication methods)
For 1.6:
Try if in terminal the following works:
It should ask for a password and then list files in the directory.
hans
I downloaded 1.6… I’ll try 1.5.1 and see if I have better luck,
Rich
Let me know if that works.
Did you try the “sudo ls” trick to verify that sudo works OK?
hans
Hello there,
is there any support for.dd images on Apple PI-baker? I have become complacent on the terminal where the Pi-baker is so easy to use!
apologies if you have already covered this somewhere, and thank you in advanced for any reply!
Jon :)
Jon
Hi Jon!
Yes you can use dd images!
…
Simply add the extension “.img” to the file and ApplePi-Baker will work with it.
Internally, ApplePi-Baker uses dd as well
hans
Hello Hans,
I also had issues with the password entry in version 1.6. I tested sudo in terminal and was able to bring up the file listing, so I’m sure the password is correct (also had the password visible during entry to make sure I wasn’t mistyping). Interestingly, when I clicked cancel the program started. I could not restore an image without the password, but the program was running.
Version 1.5.1 is working perfectly though, thanks for your efforts making this process so much simpler!
Regards,
Alex
Alex
I gave up V1.6 SUDO version. It didn’t recognize my admin password.
V1.5 Non-SUDO version worked well though it required admin password too.
10.6.8
Monkey
Admin password remain required, no matter what method (or version) will be used, since the entire SD card will be accessed. Unfortunately this cannot be avoided with the security measurements in MacOS X.
Glad to hear that 1.5 did work for you, this feedback tells me that I have to drop the method that I used in 1.6, when creating the next version.
hans
[…] ApplePi Baker (Mac) o Win32 Disk Imager (Windows). […]
I can’t get past the login. I login to my computer every time I turn it on but it will not accept my login. Says some thing about Sudo. I checked under accounts in system preferences and I am the only person listed. Don’t know where to go from here.
umpqua john
Ok. I feel stupid but just thought I should post this in case there are some other stupid people out there. I am using Yosemite from a fresh install. I tried to restore from a gzip image and it hung like others had reported. I tried all sorts of things and finally gave up so I decided to take out the SD card adapter and put it in my Linux box to burn the image. That’s when I noticed I had the Lock switch enabled on the adapter. Amazing what happens when you can actually write to the card!!!!! So not saying all of you who were having problems are stupid like me but you may just want to check the write protect switch on your micro SD card adapter if you are using one.
Blake
Thanks Blake!
Well, we all, myself included, make little goof ups like that … thanks for reporting though!
hans
[…] kartımı hazırlamak için , Mac OS X için geliştirilen Apple Pi Baker indirdim ve çalıştırdım. Apple Pi Baker açıldığında, kullanılacak SD kartı görecek ve […]
[…] besten zu W32DiskImager, wer einen Mac verwendet, nimmt RPI-sd Card Builder oder den hervorragenden ApplePi Baker. Alle Programme dieser Art sind kostenlos erhältlich, die Bedienung ist selbsterklärend. […]
[…] werden. Ich empfehle euch Raspbian (Download-Seite). Dies können Mac User sehr einfach mit dem ApplePi Baker App machen. Für Windows-User: Hier ist eine englische Anleitung: […]
Hi –
Love the concept of the PiBaker but can’t get it to work.
When I enter my password in on launch – I get the spinning beach ball and it doesn’t proceed.
Even if I press OK – and skip entering the password and enter it later when I try to do a burn it doesn’t work. !
Any idea what to do ?
Nilan
Nilan
Hi Nilan,
sorry to hear that you’re running into this issue. Some user reported similar issues. Download v1.5.1 instead and see if that version works. Unfortunately that version does not support compression.
hans
Brilliant app.
I have never got to grips with OS X and trying to write to an sd card in disk utility.
I can now get rid of my windows laptop which I only retain in order to use win32diskimager and cloning sd cards.
Tested this out by copying an image and then writing the image to sd, worked so easily.
On Yosemite 10.10.1 and Baker version 1.0.6.
bromerzz
Hi Bromerzz!
Great to hear that the app works well for you as well!
Feedback like this is always appreciated and a good motivator to keep developing little apps like this.
hans
I would like to make a paypal donation for your efforts, but cannot find a working link, If you have one could you post it?
bromerzz
Thanks Bromerzz!
That is very much appreciated, but not required. You can donate through hans at luijten dot net.
Unfortunately, PayPal forced me to remove the PayPal donation link …
hans
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes… This has been a need since I’ve owned my first Pi.
Very well done, sir.
Rhen
Rhen
Thank you very much Rhen for the great feedback!
hans
[…] und z. B. mit ApplePiBaker auf eine SD-Karte […]
Trackback: ApplePi Baker – OS X software to flash HeaterMeter Software
hans
[…] ApplePi Baker (Mac) o Win32 Disk Imager (Windows). […]
Thank you for this great tool! DD works, but it so nice to have the progress bars and to have all the tedious syntax eliminated.
Kent
Thanks Kent!
A positive feedback and thank you is always very much appreciated!
hans
Wonderful software, thanks! I’d like to donate just because it’s really saved me a lot of time. However, I do neither Amazon Smile (I already have my charity of choice) nor Bitcoin. No Paypal account for donations?
Emily
Hi Emily,
thank you very much for the positive feedback!
… claiming I’d be promoting illegal movie copying and such. Donation is much appreciated, but not required. 
PayPal donation (hans at luijten dot net, comment “ApplePi Baker”) can be done for sure, however PayPal forbid me from placing a donation link on my website
hans
Hello Thank you the newer version gave me password restriction although I m Admin.bur\t your older file worked well for me .
Brian
Thanks for the feedback Brian.
Would you be able to try a few things to see if you’re running into sudo issues?
1) In terminal try if sudo works, by trying this:
It will ask your password and show a directory listing. If it fails, you’ll be asked a few times to retry the password.
2) I read that if you have setup your Mac initially without a password, that this could cause SUDO to fail.
3) Verify in “Users & Groups” under “System Preferences” if your account has “Allow user to administer this computer” checked.
4) Can you try the following in terminal:
It should respond with a list and in that list you should find “80(admin)” …
5) Some users reports issues due to an app called “TextExpander” (source):
“TextExpander has a setting that capitalises the first letter of the first word of a “sentence”. You type your password correctly & TextExpander cleverly capitalises the first letter. You can turn this feature off on an app by app basis in the Preferences.“
Just some thoughts … I have not been able to reproduce the issue, but I’m trying to find what might be causing this.
hans
Hi,
Thanks for this utility!
One query – should it work when restoring a compressed image from an 8GB SD card onto a 16GB card? I thought this should work, but it just stops after a little bar appears in the progress bar and the status just says ‘Baking IMG Recipe’. I left it for awhile but nothing changed so I tried it again and this is what it puts in the console (in case thats of any help!):
04/02/2015 18:17:43.904 diskarbitrationd[16]: PiBaker [19376]:37547 not responding.
04/02/2015 18:17:45.973 fseventsd[65]: could not open <</Volumes/RASPBERRY/.fseventsd/fseventsd-uuid>> (No such file or directory)
04/02/2015 18:17:45.973 fseventsd[65]: log dir: /Volumes/RASPBERRY/.fseventsd getting new uuid: D2E62E1F-04C3-4CA1-BEF7-650CE0895454
04/02/2015 18:17:46.050 fseventsd[65]: Events arrived for /Volumes/RASPBERRY after an unmount request! Re-initializing.
04/02/2015 18:17:46.051 fseventsd[65]: creating a dls for /Volumes/RASPBERRY but it already has one…
04/02/2015 18:17:48.154 coreservicesd[35]: Received request to reset fmod watch. Latest received id is 42754495151217. Latest sent id is 42754495151217
04/02/2015 18:17:48.155 coreservicesd[35]: Received request to reset fmod watch. Latest received id is 42754495151217. Latest sent id is 42754495151217
04/02/2015 18:17:48.155 coreservicesd[35]: Received request to reset fmod watch. Latest received id is 42754495151217. Latest sent id is 42754495151217
04/02/2015 18:17:48.178 mds[54]: (Normal) Volume: volume:0x7ffdfa015800 ********** Bootstrapped Creating a default store:3 SpotLoc:/Volumes/RASPBERRY/.Spotlight-V100 SpotVerLoc:/Volumes/RASPBERRY/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1 occlude:0 /Volumes/RASPBERRY
04/02/2015 18:17:56.116 fseventsd[65]: disk logger: failed to open output file /Volumes/RASPBERRY/.fseventsd/000000000340c5f9 (No such file or directory). mount point /Volumes/RASPBERRY/.fseventsd
04/02/2015 18:17:56.117 fseventsd[65]: disk logger: failed to open output file /Volumes/RASPBERRY/.fseventsd/000000000340c5f9 (No such file or directory). mount point /Volumes/RASPBERRY/.fseventsd
04/02/2015 18:17:56.269 sudo[19405]: zeetha : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/Users/zeetha/Desktop ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/echo
04/02/2015 18:17:56.283 sudo[19408]: zeetha : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/Users/zeetha/Desktop ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/dd bs=4m of=/dev/rdisk1
04/02/2015 18:17:56.283 sudo[19407]: zeetha : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/Users/zeetha/Desktop ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/Users/zeetha/Downloads/ApplePi-Baker.app/Contents/MacOS/7za e -so /Users/zeetha/Desktop/PiSquaredPlusTightVNCAndStatic.zip –
04/02/2015 18:17:56.000 kernel[0]: disk1: alignment error.
04/02/2015 18:17:56.597 fseventsd[65]: check_vol_last_mod_time:XXX failed to get mount time (25; &mount_time == 0x105ccc3d8)
04/02/2015 18:17:56.597 fseventsd[65]: log dir: /Volumes/RASPBERRY/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 3ADA3C09-7FB3-4126-BC5D-4989A8099E0E
Its a new SD card and I am able to copy files to and from the disk manually so not sure why it won’t work!
Thanks,
Z
Zeetha
An update – I created a non zipped image of the 8Gb SD Card and that did get copied onto the 16Gb card by PiBaker. Now I need to remove some files from my Mac so I can create an image of the 16Gb card :)
Thanks,
Caroline
Zeetha
Hi Caroline,
yeah it’s a pain, I know …
I hope to find time to create a smarter way of making IMG files … so it will only store the relevant data. But it will require time to do some testing and research … not to mention that I have to find a good way to handle elevate rights since some folks report issues with v1.6 …
hans
Hi Zeetha!
Thanks for the log file! Does it work when the IMG is not compressed?
As for the log file, after looking at it for a while, I can only see that there appears to be a alignment error disk1 – now from what I understand this does not need to be related to disk as such, but could also be a partition or file issue. Not sure which. If it’s a file error, could it be that your compressed IMG file is corrupted? (just guessing here)
I see some errors with the RASPBERRY mount point. Is RASPBERRY a disk or network share? Or is it the SD-card?
If it’s the SD-card, could you try to manually unmount the SD card partition(s) with diskutil (not the same as eject)?
hans
[…] podemos utilizar Win32 Disk Image, para los que uséis Windows, ImageWriter para los de Ubuntu y ApplePi-Baker para los de Mac. Cuando termine este proceso, ya podemos meter la micro SD en nuestra Raspberry […]
I’m using v1.6 and when I try to make a back up of my image the app force closes? Also having the same issue with v1.5, I’m using OSX10 Yosemite?
Justin Rowe
Hi Justin,
What is the error message you get and what steps did you follow to get to this error (so I can try to reproduce the problem)?
hans
Hi Hans,
I do not get an error message, there is a pop up that shows momentarily on the screen then the whole application closes down.
I basically click on my SD card on the left and select the Create Backup button and then click the ok button on the screen that mentions zip files and image sizes, after that the app closes down with a momentary pop window just before.
Justin Rowe
Hi Justin,
That’s going to be tricky to “debug” … I really need that message, but since it seems to popup only briefly, I can imagine it to be difficult to catch. I’ve tested a few different ways, as you described, to trigger an error, but I was unable to reproduce this.
Since you’re the first and only one reporting this, I’d guess it’s something specifically on your system. Obviously hard to trace as well. And you might not have access to another Mac to give it a try.
You could try and see if there is a message in “Console” (Applications – Utilities – Console, click “Clear Display” and run ApplePi-Baker while the console remains open) …
hans
Hi Hans,
This is what I have taken from console, I hope it helps.
And thank you for your help also :-)
Justin Rowe
Thanks Justin for the quick response
…
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to learn much from the console output. I will have to look at the sources, maybe I can learn something from that, but unfortunately I’m traveling and unable to do so.
I will try as soon as I get home, but that might take another month
…
Out of curiosity: What version of MacOS X are you running?
p.s. Glad to help – I hate it when a useful program fails …
hans
Hi Hans,
Ah thats a shame that the console information didn’t give you much to go on.
Don’t worry about the timeframe as I have other means at the moment to back up my images (have to use my windows
)
Enjoy your travels and thank you again for taking the time to respond
p.s. My version of OS X is 10.10.2 (14C109), and I get the same result when using version 1.5.1 also if that helps any.
Justin Rowe
Yeah,… Windows … about that haha … that’s why I wrote the little bugger
…
I’m running the same MacOS X version, so that would not be the problem.
Since you see the same problem with 1.51, it’s not an access restriction either, as both use different methods to authenticate.
Have you ever tried the commandline method with “dd” ?
hans
Lol about windows.
I’m quite new to using command line but i’ll find out and see if I can do it that way.
Justin Rowe
Yeah I hear ya … not a big commend line fan either when it comes to these kind of things.
This guide might give you a good start:
“How to Clone Raspberry Pi SD Cards Using the Command Line in OS X“
hans
Hi Hans,
Thank you for the link I’ll have a go
Justin Rowe
Hi Hans,
Just a heads up to say that the link you gave me was very useful and I made an image using the command on there.
Thank you
Justin Rowe
Thanks Justin for getting back at me
….
So the “Flashing” of the SD card with “dd” working,… that’s good info for me.
ApplePi-Baker (both versions) use “dd”, however v1.51 uses Apple’s authorize method, whereas v1.6 uses “sudo”.
Some users seem to have problems with 1.6. But you’re the first one having issues with 1.51 as well.
I’ll have to think about a possible reason … bummer, I hoped “dd” would fail as well; haha.
At least you were able to flash an SD card …
hans
[…] ways to flash the cards using many 3rd party tools. As I’m a Mac user I’m using <> I suggest reading for the various ways to get the image on the card and these are really down to […]
Awesome, works great! Thank you!
Been looking around for something similar since RPI SD Card builder won’t work on my Mac anymore.
Eklund
Thanks Eklund for taking the time to post a “thank you”!
It’s much appreciated!
hans
[…] 2. Make your SD-card bootable and copy the image file (.img) into it. You can use ApplePi-Baker on OSX to make the RetroPie SD-card or you can do it manually. I used ApplePi-Baker and it can be found at //www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/. […]
Thanks for this App. Great idea. I have trying to create the image to my micro sd card but it does not seem like it is progressing at all. I get the status, “Baking IMG recipe…..” but there is not ETA or progress going on and the program does not seem to be hung up. I am going to let it roll for a few hours to see if perhaps it was doing something and I was just being impatient. :)
Bill
It was myself being a n00b. I hit Restore Backup and it worked fine. :)
Bill
Haha, shit happens Bill, happens to all of us … glad it worked out
…
hans
Forgive my ignorance, I have a 128g micro sd card. From what I understand, Fat32 only supports up to 32G card. You have to expand the card after you get it installed.
I have created the image on my card, but can not get the OS to boot when I put it in my Pi. :(
Bill
FAT32 itself allows up to 8TB partitions, but the formatting tools in Windows and the official SDFormatter tool only allow you to create FAT32 partitions up to 32GB
(the official SDFormatter tool automatically uses exFAT for SD cards larger than 32GB, but the Pi can’t read this format)
But you can use 3rd-party formatting tools to create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB (I’ve successfully done so on a 64GB card myself).
Regarding the failure to boot – which OSes have you tried? (NOOBS? Standalone Raspbian?)
Do you have the exact make & model number for your 128GB card?
AndrewS
Hi Bill,
no worries … the strange thing is that under Microsoft Windows, FAT32 appears to be handling up to 32Gb.
This however is not a FAT32 limitation.
It’s definitely confusing, for me as well. I’m sure I’ve formatted a 64Gb SD card before (for my Canon camera)..
According to a post at superuser.com:
There are different SD versions that support different capacities:
Most filesystems are limited in their size. You need to pick a filesystem that is capable of using the entire size of the SD card. Which one you chose is also dependent on the environment you will be using it in. Some common choices for high capacity filesystems include:
Most filesystems have a limit on the size of any one individual file:
I do not have an SD card handy (I’m traveling) to try what the MacOS X Disk-Utility will do with such a larger SD-Card, but I suspect that it will simply allow you to create a 128Gb partition and format it FAT32.
hans
The card I have is a Micro SD HC 128 Gig. I am using the RetroPie-rpi2.img on my Mac.
Should I make it a 32G partition in Disk Utility, install the OS and then expand it after I have it on my Raspberry Pi?
Thanks!
Bill
Bill
If it’s 128GB, I think you’ll find it’s actually SDXC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital
If you’re writing an .img file to your SD card, then there’s no need to manually create any partitions first (since the .img contains its own partition table).
I’d suggest trying the latest version of Raspbian (from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ ) on your card first, to check if the card itself is compatible with the RPi. If Raspbian works, and then RetroPie doesn’t, I’d say it sounds like a bug with RetroPie (which I’ve never tried myself)
AndrewS
Ok. Downloaded Raspbian, used your program to create the image on the micro sd card. I got it home and it does want to boot at all.
Bill
Hi Bill,
sorry to see that your first experiences are so disappointing …
I assume you’re trying the 128Gb card, do you have a smaller card to try if that works? (32Gb or smaller)
hans
I have a 16G micro SD card that works. I had bought a larger 128G to put ROMs on. Tempted to just buy a thumb drive and put the rooms on there and call it a day. :)
Bill
You must have a lot of ROMS!
Can I ask again for the exact make and model of 128gig micro SD card you bought? Or was it just a no-name / generic one? (in which case perhaps it was a fake?)
AndrewS
Good call Andrew! Didn’t think of that.
I did find that there are plenty fake cards in circulation … some tools to test:
FakeFlashTest, h2testw (german website), CheckFlash (and I’m sure there are more).
hans
Ehm most of those tools are for Windows though
…
Good article with good info and a Mac App at the bottom of the page … http://www.flagsoft.com/cmswp/de/products/sdspeed-sd-card-memory-speed-test/
And a way too long article for Mac users as well, which even involves compiling yourself:
http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/ (on GitHub)
hans
Good catch Andrew!
I overlooked that part … you do not need to partition the SD card when “flashing” an IMG to the SD card. “dd” doesn’t care about partitions and just bluntly writes the data to the SD card.
hans
…which is why, if you’re not careful, “dd” can be nicknamed “disk destroyer”
AndrewS
Exactly
…
hans
Hi, thanks for writing this app, it is very useful :) How about adding a sound for when the backup / restore is finished? As the backup / restore is likely to be running in the background whilst you work on something else it would be useful for there to be some kind of notification that it is complete.
Neil
Thanks Neil for leaving a positive feedback!
I like your suggestion and will add it in the next version! Thanks!
hans
[…] Try this: ApplePi-Baker […]
[…] Bevor weitere Schritte durchgeführt werden auf jeden Fall ein Backup machen. Bei der Migration ist dieses Tool hilfreich: “Apple Pi Baker” […]
Excellent program, this is saving me tons of time and disk space!
One issue I’m finding is that I can’t eject a 64G card, the Finder thinks it’s gone but the ApplePi-Baker UI thinks it’s still there. Not a panic, just something to put in the queue for FITNR…
William Smith
Thanks William!
I have not had any problems with a 64Gb card, but then again, it’s been a while that I used one of those.
As soon as I get home (still traveling) I’ll give it a try! Thanks!
hans
Looks like a great program but it will not work for me. I get stuck at the password. Even when I’m signed in as “root” user, the program refuses my password.
Using SnowLeopard might be my issue.
Bubba
Oh I never tried Snow Leopard … I wish I still had a virtual machine laying around on my Mac with some of the older OS’es.
You could try v1.51, it doesn’t support compression, but it does handle authentication better.
hans
[…] su instalacion en la tarjeta. Necesitaremos de un programa, Win32DiskImager si corremos Windows, ApplePi Baker en Mac OS o ImageWriter si estamos en […]
Hi,
I’ve tried baking an IMG file onto an SD card but it keeps getting stuck on ‘Baking IMG Recipe…’ and the load bar doesn’t seem to move much past the first 5%? Any idea how this may have happend?
Thanks
Joe
Hi Joe,
hans
Try sliding the little switch on the card.
Adam
[…] the Mac, you’ll want to download Apple-Pi Baker and CyberDuck. We’ll explain how to use this software […]
[…] is an app that I recommend you for ‘baking’ the (micro)SD cards for Raspberry Pi: ApplePi-Baker. It allows you to prepare an SD-Card for use with Raspberry Pi’s NOOBS, and it allows you to […]
[…] the Mac, you’ll want to download Apple-Pi Baker and CyberDuck. We’ll explain how to use this software […]
[…] The utility is called ApplePi-Baker and it’s available here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup#Flashing_the_SD_card_using_Mac_OSX and here: //www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/ […]
Thank you for this great tool! love it!
Malte Klima
Hi Malte Klima!
Thank you very much! Also thank you for taking the effort to leave a nice feedback!
hans
Baking IMG file
Just a warning to all you Pi fans, if your Apple PI Baker gets stuck on “Baking IMG file” eject the SD card and try sliding the little switch on the card or card adapter. This will save you ALOT of frustration. Trust me I wasted a lot of time.
Maybe John could add a warning to tell you the SD card is locked. Thx
Adam
Good idea – let me see if I can implement that (Read Only state), I actually ran into that problem the other day as well – which initially confused me as well.
Specially with MacBook Pro’s, you can accidentally “hit” the lock switch when inserting the card.
Thanks Adam! I like the idea – stupid that I didn’t think of that before!
hans
Oops! Your name is Hans, not John. Sorry my mistake. Anyway thanks for responding.
Adam
No worries
…
hans
Hans, I could create an introduction type video for Apple Pi baker. Something that would display the features and capabilities of apple pi baker. Its ok if you say no, my feelings wont be hurt. Just an idea. :) If its a yes I can just give you the youtube link and full acces to display it on a website.
Thanks, Pixel Plex, aka Adam
pixelplex
Hi Pixel Plex!
Nice to see such enthusiasm, I love it …
As for the icon:
Yours looks great, unfortunately another user already made a new icon for ApplePi-Baker’s next release. I very much appreciate your efforts though – the icon looks really good!
As for the instruction video:
Please be my guest to make one! I’m sure a certain audience would love that. Post the link here and I’ll take a look – if it’s good then I’ll add it to the article!
I hope to find time in the near future to revamp ApplePi-Baker and add more functionality. My biggest hurdle right now is that working with the new security “features” by Apple are more work and more complicated than the functionality in ApplePi-Baker it self
… I could use some help porting the new security features to Lazarus Pascal …
hans
Im not dissappointed about the icon. Im to exited to make the video! Thanks for giving me a chance! This is the best rasoberry pi program ever!
pixelplex
First, I ment raspberry pi not rasoberry pi. Typo
Second, when are you planning on getting that update out. Im in no rush, and i dont want to rush you,but I want to make the video up-to-date with the new icon made by the other user. And the new features that might be in the update. So I dont have to make it two times in a short time. If its possible could you give me the new icon. Just somthing to consider. I want to make the best video possible.
pixelplex
I can email it to you
… and typos happen to me all the time haha, no worries.
One thing though: ApplePi-Baker (I hope) will be very different if I manage to get things done that I’d like to do … so your video would be outdated then right away. I’m guessing it will take a couple of months before I get the new version ready (I’ve been traveling a lot the past 6 months and I expect that to continue for a few more months).
hans
An instruction video would be VERY welcome though
…
hans
So, have you emailed that file already, or are still planing to get that out. I haven’t got it yet.
Anyway, just wondering
pixelplex
Sending you an email now!
hans
Also maybe as part of the new update you could add this icns file I made. This file will look better with the new Yosemite look. Again, just an idea. See the icns file here. If you have errors downloading just reply to this.
I want to help this program grow because it is so great!
pixelplex
[…] Cette méthode reste assez proche de ce que l’on faisait sous Windows avec Win32 Disk Imager sauf que la c’est un utilitaire un peu plus poussé qui porte le doux nom de ApplePi Baker. […]
Not sure if I’m missing something or what. I select the SD card, pick the image… and nothing. It does not start baking just sits there saying “waiting for recipe (idle) …” Ive tried 2 different images and 2 different SD cards. What might I be doing wrong mate?
Ash
Oh god, never mind… I’m so thick! Good program mate :)
Ash
What’s the solution please? It’s also saying “Waiting for Recipe (Idle)” when I click Create Backup. I’ve selected the SD card.
Lindsay
Did you try to reboot your Mac, and reset the SMC?
Some users report this to work for them.
Also; which version of MacOS are you using?
hans
I have OSX SierraI did not reset the SMC but I found a solution which I documented below.
Lindsay
Hi Ash!
No problem, happens to the best of us!
So what happened? Kept the SD-Card on “Lock” (read-only)?
hans
This is happening to me too.
The SD card “lock” is not on however.
Chris
hey there, I keep getting stuck on “baking img recipe” I can’t find any switches or locks like others have suggested, it’s just stuck. any help?
Artie
Hi Artie!
Check the side of the SD card. There should be a tiny latch that can be shifted in the “lock” position.
A micro SD card does not have such a switch, but a regular SD card and a SD card adapter for micro SD cards does. See below:
hans
And see also the images on Wikipedia here
AndrewS
hans
I want to clone my OSMC SD card to another SD card, will the PiBaker work for this? I can’t believe I’m having such a hard time figuring out this cloning thing. Thought Carbon Copy Cloner would be the simplest way but I haven’t figured it out. Thanks
Peter
Hi Peter,
yes you can clone a card with ApplePi-Baker. Simply insert the card, refresh the SD-card list in ApplePi-Baker so you can see the card, and then click “Backup”. This will result in an IMG file which at a later time can be used to restore the image to an SD card of the same size (or bigger).
Is that what you were looking for?
hans
But be aware that unless you’re using the exact same make and model of SD card, an “8GB” card from one manufacturer will probably have a (slightly) different size to an “8GB” card from another manufacturer. This is something which catches a lot of people out. If you backup from a “slightly bigger” 8GB card, and try to restore to a “slightly smaller” 8GB card, then the new card probably won’t work correctly on the Pi.
Hans – is this something that your ApplePiBaker checks for?
AndrewS
Wouldn’t the card have to be filled up to make this problematic?
Peter
A filesystem is free to ‘spray data’ wherever it likes, there’s no guarantee that it will start at the beginning of the partition and then write sequentially until the end of the partition.
AndrewS
Andrew is right … data is scattered all over the card, no guarantee that things are nicely lined up …
hans
You’re very correct about this Andrew!!!
No, unfortunately, ApplePi-Baker is not catching that. One of the improvements I have in mind for a new version (that and checking if an SD card is locked/readonly). This becomes specially tricky when using compressed IMG files.
With version 1.6 I’m (de)compressing on the fly, which saves a lot of time. However, to determine the exact fit, I would have to decompress the IMG first and compare the file size with the SD-Card size. This would almost double the write time to restore an IMG to the SD-Card – and writing is already slow as it is …
Another thought I had, was trying to resize an IMG to it’s minimum needed size, but that opens a whole new can of worms, since not every IMG uses the same file system, and the Mac natively does not support any of the Ext file systems. On top of that we’d need to add a “resize to full size” function. Again, lack of Ext support makes this very tricky and it will probably go a little beyond my expertise.
hans
Some of what you describe above is part of the reason that NOOBS works the way it does ;-) (it uses tarballs of the filesystem contents, rather than img files of the whole filesystem). But of course NOOBS is Linux-based and so is able to write to Ext4 filesystems, unlike Mac OS X.
Maybe when creating a compressed IMG backup of an SD card, you could store its uncompressed size as an extended attribute on the file? :)
AndrewS
Yep, NOOBS starts with a tiny partition … and creates a large partition and restoring a small IMG file to that partition. That was my interpretation any way (more details).
To accomplish that we’d need Ext filesystem support, which the Mac does not have unless we install OSXFuse or Paragon ExtFS. The first one being free, the second one being commercial but maybe more mature. (I use Paragon NTFS and it’s super solid)
I’m afraid that just making a tar-ball of the files on a partition will not be good enough to make a bootable SD card. Not to mention the different (?) filesystems being used for Raspberry (for example FAT, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, are there more?). But … it could be an interesting start.
I’ll try OSXFuse or maybe even buy a copy from Paragon to see what we can do with that.
hans
Hello,
I just ran in to the issue of a non-writeable card, it was not the lock switch but another weird issue. After reading this post on the forum i did a manual format to check if there was a write problem. It worked ok and after that, pi-baker worked great. I wonder if instead of trying to do a read-only check in your process, which you said is difficult to do, why not have a separate button that runs a format of the card, or just a simple create file/folder to check for read-only issues. You could just have it as a separate process or a pre-processing check? Anyway, just my two cents. Awesome program btw.. i love it!!! Thank you for all your hard work.
Torquil Harkness
Hi Torquil,
Thanks for the compliment and suggestion
…
Creating a file or folder on media is something I’d rather not do, just to avoid screwing up the files and such. I will however try to make a new version of Pi-Baker that does a read-only check – I might have found a way to do that, just need the time to implement it.
hans
It’s exactly what I was looking for. Thank you
Peter
Cool
hans
[…] doen door de kant en klare Raspberry Pi 2 KAOSmediabox image te downloaden en die door middel van Apple Pi Baker voor OSX of met Win32Diskimager voor Windows op je SD kaart kan worden gezet waarna je de SD in je […]
Hi there
It’s really a great little tool, you wrote here. Easy to use and works perfect.
Many thanks :-)
Bertrand
Bertrand
Hi Bertrand!
Thanks! It’s always much appreciated that users take the time to leave a nice feedback!
Thanks again!
hans
[…] de commencer, télécharger ApplePi Baker afin de préparer la micro SD pour l’image Noobs qui se trouve […]
Could you please set the password visibility to be off by default! Having clear text password fields is a big no-no. Having the option to show it is fine by me so long as it’s the option. Any instance where my password can be visible fills me with instant district for the software. Thanks for everything else; works great and is nice and quick.
EkDor
Hi Ekdor,
Thanks for the feedback – I will add this to the “ToDo” list.
Maybe I’ll additional add that it saves the most recent selected setting (visible/not visible) as well.
For those that have a specific preference and would not want to toggle the checkbox each time they work with it.
hans
I think that would be ideal. Cool.
EkDor
[…] ce faire, il nous faut un logiciel capable de copier ce système sur la cacarte. ApplePi-Baker est parfait pour cela. De plus, il permettra de prendre de prendre des […]
Hi Hans,
Just wanted to say thank you for a great application! It worked perfectly for what I needed.
I looked for a Paypal link to donate and didn’t find one. You might consider adding that to your website. I will use your Amazon link on my next order.
Again, thank you! Nice work.
Kind regards,
Steve
Steve
Hi Steve!
Thank you so much for leaving a nice comment!
I used to have a PayPal Donate button, but PayPal seems to think that I’m promoting illegal copying of DVD’s and even blocked my account for a while. Funny that when you rip your DVD it’s OK, and when you show it a different way, you’re suddenly on the blacklist. They won’t even listen to arguments.
You could of course still donate by using hans at luijten dot net as an email address, and say something like “ApplePi-Baker”.
But … donations are optional and I very much appreciate the shopping gesture!
Thanks you very much … !
hans
[…] Para la descarga podéis ir a la web del programador. […]
[…] the Virtual machine). You will see a .raw file you can rename to .img and flash with Win32Imager, Apple Pi Baker or whatever you usually use to write the image to the SD […]
[…] muss mit dem Mac nicht mit der Konsole / Terminal arbeiten: Mit dem kostenlosen Programm “Apple Pi Baker” lässt sich auch mit einfacher grafischer Oberfläche ein Image-Backup einer SD-Karte […]
[…] Wind32DiskImager でMacは ApplePi-Baker […]
I tried to use version 1.6 logged in with a user who is not administrator … providing the admin password … unfortunately it did not work.
Markus
1.6 uses “sudo” – would (under that same user) this work?
(asks for password, provide admin password and see if it runs)
hans
Hey, apple pi baker won’t work. its says that it is “Baking IMG recipe…” but it won’t actually do anything it seems like
Xander
Hi Xander,
whan that happens, your SD card (or micro SD card adapter) is most likely locked, ie. set to “read-only”. See also this comment.
In the next release I hope to include a read-only detection.
Sorry for the inconvenience and I hope it resolves your issue.
hans
I think we made progress bc the sd was named raspberry and it told me that it created a single portion but then it reverted and says “Baking IMG Recipe…” as it did before and doesn’t seem to be doing much.
Xander
what do you mean by “read only”
Xander
So i switched the sd to unlocked and when i tried it again it renamed the sd to Raspberry and said it made a new partition but then it said “Baking IMG Recipe…” but wasn’t actually making progress.
Xander
Hi Xander,
“Baking IMG recipe …” indicates that ApplePi-Baker is trying to write the provided IMG file to your SD card.
For this you’ll need to authenticate (v1.5) or have provided a sudo password at startup (v1.6).
Partitioning actually needs this as well. So it’s a little weird that it would partition but not write the IMG file.
If it actually did re-partition the SD card then “read-only” would not be the problem either (but I assume you’ve already figured that one out).
One thing I can say, but this is possible not relevant for your situation, is that when I use a micro SD-card adapter, it quite often tends to get locked when I slide it into the SD card reader of my MacBook Pro (the side of the SD card seems to hit the SD card slot, and therefor slide the “lock” switch to “locked”) – even to the point that I bought a cheap USB micro SD card reader from AliExpress ($0.82/piece).
Writing an IMG file can take several minutes, depending on the side of the IMG file. But progress should definitely be noticeable after a second or 10.
The actual IMG file should not matter – worse case scenario (for example when it really wasn’t a IMG file) the SD card won’t boot in your Raspberry Pi.
Are you using a regular IMG file? Or a compressed file (Zip, 7Zip, gZip, etc)?
hans
lol nvm I’m good it worked haha
Xander
Awesome!
hans
[…] //www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/ […]
I installed today in yosemite
Really cool app, thanks!
Bill
Thanks Bill
I always appreciate it when users take the time to leave a nice feedback!
hans
Great tool! Thanks for sharing it! For the other RPi n00bs out there, be sure to allocate the full space of your SD card using raspi-config’s Expand Filesystem option.
Ernie C
Thanks Ernie for the compliment and the tip!
It’s much appreciated!
hans
I have been using this for quite some time now and I never came across any problems until I installed El Capitan. It could not list the SD card or USB card mounted. Anybody else having this issue?
Allan
Hi Allan,
Could you try, in terminal, to do:
Then find the device that is your SD card, for example “disk1” (first row of that drive), and try
and then post the output line part where it says “Protocol:“?
This way I can see if there is something that has changed.
I have yet to setup a virtual machine to test El Capitan – unless you can tell me that you have had zero problems with El Capitan. I’d be using it on my “production” Mac and can’t really afford being crippled.
hans
Hi Hans,
It shows “Secure Digital” on Protocol.
I only noticed one problem so far with El Capitan (Beta 4) and that is plug-in failure with uploading photos.
Allan
OK, maybe I’ll collect some courage and migrate one of my Mac’s to El Captian.
.
I’ve participated in too many beta’s the past years to find that it’s unwise to run it on a “production” machine haha
hans
I’m seeing the same problems in OS X 10.11b6. With version 1.6 all controls are greyed out or don’t do anything, with 1.51 the only active control is the file dialog to load an image.
On my iMac my SD card’s Protocol is USB.
I tried turning off System Integrity Check (SIC) in recovery mode, but that didn’t make any difference. Even so, I suspect that this is related to the fact that the language you’re using is Carbon based and/or that certain APIs now no longer have access to system related files and processes—apparently even when SIC is turned off.
Philip Robar
Oops, that should be System Integrity Protection (SIP).
Phil
Philip Robar
Would you mind giving v1.7 a try? … I do not have any El Capitan users around me, besides myself.
It would be greatly appreciated.
hans
Hi Philip,
Nice work! And I think it should be called SIC
.
I’m unfortunately bound to Carbon (Lazarus Pascal limitation).
I have installed El Capitan, but have to admit that I have ran into a lot of unexpected problems even running it properly. Last night I installed the latest beta (forgot whether it was beta 3 or 4). I will give it a try today!
It would be a shame if it’s Carbon related …
hans
I’ve been toying with 10.11 (El Capitan) for a bit now, but OMG what is Apple doing?
As an example: I cannot even copy GDB (debugger) into /usr/bin. Not even with sudo. This appears to be an issue seen all over the web. Short from booting rootless=0 (which is an nvram option that will disappear in the final release of El Capitan) … and I’m not even sure if that is going to work.
Now I’m afraid Apple is going bonkers, and making OS X like iOS …
(still trying though to get things done)
hans
Well, finally managed to get a new release available which runs under El Capitan (10.11 beta 3) after 2 days of work … It took me more work than expected, since my developers environment is no longer working under El Capitan (thanks again Apple!).
The output of disk utility was quite different from the output of previous Mac OS X versions and that’s where things went wrong. So I now included a more rugged code, with exceptions for 10.11 and previous Mac OS X versions.
This should be fixed now …
hans
Hi Alan,
did you try version 1.7?
below one user reports it crashing, but I can’t reproduce the problem. Other El Capitan users could maybe give 1.7 a try and see if this is consistent or just an incident.
Thanks!
hans
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[…] SD cards for RaspberryPis – though I did discover a great OS X utility for doing this, Apple Pi Baker. Anyway, Rune Audio mounted by 64GB FAT32 USB stick and indexed it pretty quickly. It played audio […]
Thanks for the great tool!!!!!!
Nick
Thanks Nick!
It’s always great to receive a nice feedback!
hans
Hi, thanks for the great tool. I have been running this successfully for a while now, but recently can’t get the app to start anymore. I rebooted my Mac and also deleted and re-installed several times. It goes to the step where it asks for the admin password, but then does not boot up further.
I am running OS X Yosemite, v 10.10.4, MacBook Air. Any log I can provide to check whats wrong?
Thanks
Kai
Hi Kai!
Sorry – I have not (yet) added a log option, but you could start Applications – Utilities – Console, click “Clear Display” and start ApplePi-Baker. I should give you some messages. Maybe there is a hint there to what might have gone wrong.
hans
This is what I get:
31/07/15 22:14:21,203 sudo[2635]: kaixxx : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/ps -ax
Kai
That looks normal.
Can you try, in Terminal (under: Applications – Utilities):
It will ask for your password, use the same one you’ve used for ApplePi-Baker and see what kind of message you’re getting.
If all goes well, it should output the same as
from the command line.
hans
On sudo ls, it outputs:
.CFUserTextEncoding .rmembid GDrive
.DS_Store Applications Library
.Trash Desktop Movies
.bash_history Documents Music
.cups Downloads Pictures
.dropbox Dropbox Public
.mapbox-studio G-OLD
On ls, it outputs:
Applications Downloads GDrive Music
Desktop Dropbox Library Pictures
Documents G-OLD Movies Public
Kai
Thanks Kai!
Looks like sudo works as it should – which is good!
After entering the SUDO password in ApplePi-Baker, does it show a message or simply disappear?
hans
It just disappears and the rolling colorful Apple ball comes up. I could pase the Apple crash report if that helps.
Kai
I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what to do with the crash report – if I recall correctly, it has a boat load of data in it that I wouldn’t know what to do with.
The beachball cursor suggests a task is “stuck”.
What happens after entering the SUDO password, is that AppelPi Baker does do a quick check to see if the password works. For some reason it gets in a loop – I will look at the code and see what the issue might be.
hans
Hi ,
how can i download and use the app with my windows desktop >
thanks
Alaa
Hi Alaa,
I’m sorry to say that there is no Windows version. For Windows you can use Win32-DiskImager.
hans
Thanks for reply but i have the apple TV the 1 st generation and i don’t want to lose it , before i used to watch youtube but now i cant do any thing with it , i will open the link you send me then i will write for you , so thanks again
Alaa
Thanks for reply but i have the apple TV the 1 st generation and i don’t want to lose it , before i used to watch youtube but now i cant do any thing with it , i will open the link you send me then i will write for you , so thanks again
Alaa
Hi Alaa,
I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish?
ApplePi-Baker is mainly intended to write IMG files to disks (for example for Raspberry Pi or a USB stick).
Are you trying to make a USB stick, so you can restore your AppleTV?
hans
[…] you should make a full backup of the SD card with Win32DiskImager, Apple Pi Baker or dd in Ubuntu, Debian or other Linux distros (Ubuntu guide in the virtual machine follows […]
Tried version 1.6 of Apple Pi Baker, but does not accept my password (“incorrect SUDO password”).
This is 10.6.8 Snow Leopard if it is significant.)
Will go back to version 1.5, but just thought you would want to know.
Pete
Hi Pete,
Thanks for reporting! Can you try (in Terminal):
it will ask for your password.
Just curious if it’s your account (yes/no Sudo access) or another underlying problem.
hans
Sorry for taking a year to reply…
Password is accepted in sudo, works fine.
This occurs in version 1.8.1, still using Snow Leopard.
Went back to using version 1.5, which works OK.
Thanks for a nice program.
Pete
Hi Pete,
Oh … I do not have the means to test with Snow Leopard.
.
The arrival of El Capitan caused quite a few extra headaches, and Snow Leopard is a little old, so I never even considered (sorry!) testing the latest version with Snow Leopard. I better make sure to not remove the old version from the downloads
Thanks for the “Thank you”
…
hans
Hey when i use Apple Pi baker to install the IMG file to the sd card it makes a 50 Mb Partion which is not enough for my files on the OS any way to stop this
otto
Hi Otto,
not sure what you’re referring to, but in v1.6 there is an “Abort” button to stop the writing process.
Is that what you mean?
hans
It sounds like Otto is just seeing the small (FAT format) ‘boot’ partition, and hasn’t realised that when you write an IMG file it also creates a much larger (ext4 format) ‘root’ partition?
I’m guessing that like Windows, MacOS X only mounts FAT partitions, and doesn’t mount ext4 partitions, hence the ‘root’ partition is invisible to MacOS X (but still visible to Linux).
AndrewS
Good catch Andrew!
I completely forgot about that!
hans
ApplePi-Baker v1.7 just got released …
Some issues I have addressed:
– Compatibility with El Capitan (Mac OSX 10.11)
– Hidden password and improved Sudo password entry dialog
– Indication if media is READ-ONLY or not
– Better media description
Please feel free to provide feedback …
hans
Hello,
Pi-Baker seems to crash every time i put my password in…
Pi-Baker 1.7
OSX EL-Capitan Beta 4
Console log:
It looks like maybe the password isn’t being sent?
Calum Knott
Hi Calum,
The password is not sent through the commandline for security reasons – otherwise anyone with access to your log-files would be seeing your password in plain text, not something we’d want.
What message do you get when it crashes?
I’d be very interested in fixing this issue.
hans
No message is given, just a spinning ball, and then you must force quit.
I believe it is the same error as Kai was having:
//www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/#comment-140483
Calum Knott
That’s … weird. Sounds like a process is stuck …
Richt after entering the SUDO password, ApplePi-Baker does a little test in the background to see if the password is any good. That seems to get stuck … if the password would have been good, you’d see the regular interface, if not then a message should appear stating that the password didn’t work.
Do you have any AntiVirus software or something like that installed?
I’m just grasping at straws now, since I cannot reproduce the issue, but I’d really like to find out what is going on.
Maybe today I’ll make a version that sends log messages … maybe we can track better what is going on.
hans
I have been able to reproduce the issue, even though it’s under strange circumstances on my Mac (not suggesting it happens on yours for the same reasons).
However, when I have “gdb” installed (debbuger), then ApplePi-Baker hangs right after asking for the password, as described.
I’m trying to find a solution for this.
Note that after removing gdb (/usr/local/bin) this problem does NOT occur.
hans
I’ve just prepared a new version (1.72), which hopefully addresses this problem.
I also took the opportunity to introduce the new icon, created by Kray Mitchell.
hans
Hi,
i get Ultra-High transfer-Rates since update to 1.7 of about 18 – 19 Mb/s but after the progress bar is at 100 % the ETA value goes to minus something and counts down further to negative values…
it seems there is something broken… File size is also not increase while this happens…
Roland
i have to add: i happens in Backup-Mode
Roland
and with no compression (classical .img image)
OS 10.10.4 on iMac via hama microSD2USB adaptor
Roland
Hi Roland,
I’ll give that a try this afternoon, I think I have a similar microSD adapter laying around.
Any speed improvements would not be related to any changes in 1.7 (although I do like speed haha).
hans
Hi Calum and Roland, could you give v1.72 a try.
I’m having some difficulties reproducing the problem, not to mention that my developers environment is not quite happy with El Capitan yet … but I HOPE to have found the potential problem.
hans
Hi Hans i think it has fixed the problem,
Thanks!!
Calum Knott
Phew … that’s good to hear … I was running out of ideas how to fix it.
hans
[…] quickest method I’ve found to load a disk image using Mac OS X is to use a program called ApplePi-Baker. The program will automatically detect the SD card, unmount it and load an image file of your […]
Hi, I couldn’t find a different place to put this to I hope that it’s okay to be here.
I was gifted a Pi kit that already had the OS on it. I want to add to the SD card by putting RetroPie on as well. However, after reading the instructions here, the options seem to wipe the card then put the image on, which would remove the OS. Is there a way I can add to it but not replace it?
Apologies if the solution is obvious.
Cooper
Hi Cooper,
Most systems can do a so called dual-boot, but I have to admit that I have never tried that on a Raspberry Pi.
As an alternative you could try to install everything for Retro-Pi on an existing system – but that will take a lot of work, and again I have to admit that I have never done or considered doing that.
Probably the easiest is just getting another SD-card, they are relatively cheap.
hans
Would you recommend any peripherals? My pi only has 1 SD slot, what’s a good method for adding another?
Cooper
Well, adding an extra SD slot is not easy.
I did read once that you can prep the SD card in such a way that the Raspberry Pi continues its boot from an USB drive.
I have not (yet) done this myself, and people claim it makes the Pi run faster than running of an SD card.
Some links: samhobbs.co.uk, RaspiPress, Instructables, etc.
While searching fro booting from USB, I did find BerryBoot as well, which seems to allow you to boot multiple OS’es from one SD card. Maybe that’s more suitable for what you’re looking for?
hans
The app hangs after input the sudo password. I’m using el capitan. I have the logs in case the developer wants to see it.
Victor
8/19/15 21:14:12.049 sudo[1501]: Victor : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/ps -ax
Victor
This looks normal, root password is passed in a different way so it can’t be found in the log as readable text …
hans
Hi Victor,
which version are you using? (see titlebar of ApplePi-Baker)
hans
Filename: ApplePi-Baker.zip
Version: 1.72
Size: 4.0 MiB
I have downloaded yesterday.
I tried with 1.5.1 too but it never detected the sd card.
Victor
Thanks Victor!
…
I’ll look at it today, to see if I can find what the problem might be.
Unfortunately it runs fine under my El Capitan, so that might become a challenge.
But I’ll try anyway
hans
I’m also having the problem with the app hanging after entering in my password. It remains in the dock, but nothing else happens and my only option is to Force Quit. I just downloaded the app today, so I’m using the latest version (v1.72) and I am running a fully updated version of Yosemite. Don’t really know where to look for a solution, but would love to be able to use this app :)
Hugh Lashbrooke
Hi Hugh,
I will look at it today to see if I can find what might the problem. Under both Yosemite and El Capitan Beta 4, ApplePi-Baker runs just fine on my Macs. I’ll create a few virtual machines so I can test on a “clean” Mac, hopefully able to reproduce this.
My apologies for the inconvenience. Does 1.51 run on yours?
hans
Yeah – v1.5.1 works on my Mac. Would that be fine to use? Or are the 1.72 updates critical for getting this working correctly?
Hugh Lashbrooke
Hi Hugh!
Yes 1.51 should work just fine.
After 1.51 (1.6, 1.7x) I only added the option to work with compressed files directly (ie. flash a zipped IMG file without having to unzip it first), and support for El Capitan (MacOS X 10.11, Apple felt the need to break things).
I will do some more testing under Yosemite though – would be nice if the compression trick would work as well of course.
hans
OK great – thanks for your hard work on this – makes it possible to get my Pi setup like I want :)
Hugh Lashbrooke
Cool – keep an eye on this page, as I will try to solve the issues with the newer version. I just wish Apple would have not made it so difficult to develop anything – I’m spending 90% of my time working around their security “ideas” and OS changes.
hans
Hi Hans, seems to be not working on Beta 4 for me again now, hangs after password input!
Calum Knott
Hi Calum,
For some reason it works fine here, and I cannot reproduce the problem.
Once I get time, I’ll try to setup a clean virtual machine with 10.11 beta 4 to see what happens on a clean machine.
Sorry for the inconvenience …
hans
[…] Sur Mac, ApplePi-Baker […]
[…] in as the computer’s bootable hard disk. I prefer using Win32 Disk Imager and I found ApplePi-Baker to be useful on Mac OS X. There’s a great overview of different methods here: […]
Hi there,
by the login field of the August Version it always said worrng password. With the older version (2014) it works perfectly!
P.S. Sorry for my English (I am a german)
Oscar B.
P.P.S. I am using Mac OSX Version 10.6.8
Oscar B.
Hi Oscar,
thank you for the additional info.
The problem started with El Capitan, and trying to get ApplePi Baker to work on El Capitan.
Well, as you’ve noticed, this came with a bundle of weird problems – thanks Apple for making developing applications less and less fun …
Anyhow … good to know that you’re not having this issue with the August version.
I’ll go back to the drawing board. Really wished I could have still used the original 1.51 Authentication method, but Apple claims it’s depreciated and it won’t let me pipe data to a (de)compression program.
hans
For those interested in giving it a try …
I have made a small modification to this test version of v1.72 since I cannot reproduce the issue where entering a password basically keeps ApplePi-Baker in an seemingly endless loop …
Feel free to download it from this link.
It’s a fully working version, I just changed the way it handles the password check a little bit.
Please let me know if this fixed it for you and what version of MacOS X you’re running.
hans
Did anyone with the password problem, test this test version yet?
I’m curious …
Please post here if this resolved the issue and what version of MacOS X you’re running.
I have tested this one on MacOS X 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11 beta 5.
hans
I’ve just tested it and it still hangs after entering the password.
Running 10.10.4 on a 15″ MBP.
Let me know if I can help further on debugging this.
Slash
Thanks Slash,
Back to the drawing board I guess … crap.
I’d very much appreciate help with debugging – I know where in the code it might get stuck. I just don’t understand why it’s getting stuck there. It’s right after entering the password where ApplePi-Baker verifies if the password works properly with sudo. I just cannot reproduce it on any of my Mac’s.
Would you mind keeping an eye on these comments, for when I post a new version?
I will try to get one available today or at the least tomorrow
hans
Hi Hans.
Of course I can help, I’m not sure if you can see my email address, if you can feel free to send me an email and I can test it right away.
The console output only shows a sudo attempt on performing a “ps -ax” (I guess) and it stops right there.
I’m glad I can be useful on testing this.
Regards,
Slash
I just emailed you a new version (v1.73 beta 1 – hopefully it stays at “beta 1”
).
Please let me know if this one works properly.
I think I found a way to reproduce the problem.
hans
Thanks for the SUPER fast help!
hans
Awesome – thanks Slash, I very much appreciate that.
I’ll sent you an email as soon as I have a new version to test.
The console output is correct, I’m sending the password through stdin since I do not want a password to be readable in the log file in plain text, I have yet to figure an easy way to add other messages to the log.
hans
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[…] Se come me sei su Mac, usa Apple Pi Baker; […]
[…] I prepared the SD card on my mac, I used ApplePi Baker to transfer the […]
Trying to use 1.7.2 on my Retina Macbook Pro with OS X 10.10.4. Enter my admin password for sudo and just get an endless spinning ball until I force quit.
Roger
Hi Roger,
thanks for the feedback – did you try this test version or the “official” v1.72?
hans
I just released v1.73, which should address this issue.
hans
[…] Download Apple Pi Baker to format your SD card and copy the Raspbian image you downloaded in step //www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/ […]
For those interested, here is a new test version … I just gave it an arbitrary beta name: v1.73 beta 1.
I managed to reproduce the “hangs after password entry” issue and have changed the way sudo password testing is done. Tested on MacOS X 10.10 and 10.11 (beta 6 I think).
Additionally, I fixed the issue with being able to make a backup of a read-only drive – in the 1.7 version this was disabled.
Please test and send feedback if you can … it would be greatly appreciated.
hans
ApplePi-Baker v1.73 available
I truly hope that this version finally resolves the freeze after entering the Sudo password (it has been quite difficult to reproduce this problem on my Mac’s).
Additionally enabled are Retina and making backups of read-only drive.
Thanks to Slash for the very quick support in testing this version.
hans
[…] programma capace di espandere ed installare correttamente l’immagine sulla sd ( consiglio ApplePIE – Baker cscaricabile cliccando qui […]
Apple pi Baker is nice, but it only restores the first partition of an image.
In case the image has a boot-partition backup fails.
Really sad.
Olli
Oliver
Ho Olli,
unfortunately … you’re wrong … and something else must be going wrong (I’d be happy to test your scenario though).
ApplePi-Baker does not pay attention to partition at all.
Just as with “dd”, it images and restores the raw drive, so byte by byte the entire disk, and does not even try to read or detect partitions.
Is your target SD card or USB drive the exact same size as the source?
hans
Oh the target drive must be exactly the same size or bigger …
(that might have been clear in my previous message)
hans
Version 1.73 hangs for over an hour when restoring img file. (OSX 10.9.5) “Baking IMG recipe ….” and 10% progress (or so) showing on the bar.
Tried both the IMG and the ZIP version of the image with same results.
I confirmed ZIP download was complete with SHA sum from raspbx downloads. 4Gig image writing to 16Gig micro-sd card.
Mike Cone
First card was Class-2 device. Tried it with Class-10 card and Abort button appeared and it started writing the data.
Go figure.
Mike Cone
Hi Mike,
I’m sorry to hear that you’re experiencing problems …
Does v1.51 work correctly?
When ApplePi-Baker hangs it usually means there is no info coming back from “dd”.
This used to happen for example when the card was Read-Only, but in 1.73 that shouldn’t happen anymore (since it detects read=only and prevents you from writing).
I will try the image you’ve linked to an see if I can reproduce the problem.
hans
Thanks for posting your findings …
Could the class-2 card be corrupt?
hans
Hi,
I’m using OSX El Capitan. ApplePi baker starts and asks for a sudo/root password. When I enter that at says the either the password is incorrect (not the case) or I do not have sudo rights (also incorrect). Any ideas?
Regards,
BootZ
BootZ
Hi BootZ,
sorry to hear your experiencing issues with ApplePi-Baker. El Capitan has been quite the pain …
In ApplePi-Baker I execute “sudo -kSv” and pass the password through stdin. 3 possible outcomes (after waiting 1 second):
– Password OK
– Password FAIL
– The sudo command “hangs” or did not complete.
What happens when you try the following statement in Terminal:
It should ask for your Sudo password and return to the prompt, something like this:
If the password is invalid then it say:
hans
Hi Hans,
Tried it (duso -kv) and it gives me no error(s) after providing the correct password.
Regards,
BootZ
BootZ
Thanks BootZ,…
I’ll go try to get that same problem – hopefully I can reproduce it.
hans
I got it working by starting the app from Terminal with “sudo ./ApplePi-Baker.app/Contents/MacOS/PiBaker”. Then I have to click on the provided sudo Window and it accepted my password…
BootZ
Interesting find … I have not been able to reproduce the problem.
I’ll try to compile a version today that waits a little longer on sudo confirmation and will post a link here for you to test. I could, if you don’t mind, email it to you as well.
hans
Hi Hans,
That’s fine by me!
Regards,
BootZ
BootZ
I’ve sent you an email yesterday, did you get it?
hans
Ah yes and tested it. Works fine now!
BootZ
Awesome! Then I’ll upload this one as a quiet update (1.74).
hans
Is it possible to use ApplePi-Baker to save both Noobs and XBMC onto my SD card without either of them writing over each other? I’m trying to install both OS on my Raspberry Pi 2 and I’ve had nothing but unfortunate results so far…
Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks,
-Steve
Steve S
Hi Steve,
unfortunately, that will not work …
ApplePi-Baker uses “DD” to write an image and “DD” simply overwrites the entire SD card.
You’d probably have to all this manually. Create a partition for each OS and find some kind of bootmanager to choose fro which OS to boot. As far as I know, a good tool as a boot manager would be BerryBoot, but I’ll admit to have never tried it.
hans
If you use NOOBS while connected to the internet, you can network-install OpenELEC and/or OSMC, which are Pi-optimised versions of XBMC/Kodi.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/noobs.md
AndrewS
hans
Hi,
I try to restore an image on my SD card, but when I want to select the image file, I have the rainbow wheel and I am forced to force quit the Apple Pi-Baker.
Do you know why ?
Jérémie
Jérémie
I finally get through it… I put all files on my Desktop in a subfolder and bye bye the rainbow wheel…
Don’t know why though…
Jérémie
Hi Jérémie,
that’s odd indeed … I will run a few tests today to see if this might be a common problem or not.
Thank you very much for bringing it to my attention!
hans
Was this ever resolved? I get a crash on any restore now…
Jordan
Hi Jordan,
Which version are you using at this moment?
If the spinning beachball appears, it means that your Mac is busy doing something like in this case: mounting, or unmounting the SD card. This should have been addressed in the latest version (1.9.1).
hans
I am using the latest, 1.9.1. A restart seems to have corrected the issue but then after another restore, it gets hung up if I try to restore again… Until a restart… Maybe it’s a my system issue.
Is there any documentation on how to restore a 16GB card to an 8GB card, if only 2GB are actually being used? Is that possible?
Jordan
Hi Jordan,
Sounds like your system, somehow is locking the SD card – a restart releasing that particular “lock”. Do you have any applications running that might access the SD card? For example Anti Virus or a clean-up application (to remove MacOS X hidden files from network shares and external drives)?
Theoretically, you can size down the 16Gb image (holding only 2Gb of actual data) to 8Gb. It takes a lot of trickery, for example found here. I’ll be honest; I have never tried any of these kind of instructions. At some point I wanted to implement something like that into AppePi-Baker, but the lack of filesystem support and the wide variety of different images, makes it very complicated to implement and it’s just way over my head …
hans
There’s also the SD Card Copier in the latest version of Raspbian (see https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-update-raspbian/ ) which can apparently copy a larger card onto a smaller card.
AndrewS
Retina support does not seem to be working on the iMac 5K
mike
Oh nice, wish I had a iMac 5K …
Did you try (in Terminal) the following:
hans
Just wondering if there’s an issue with Metadata not always saving in retropie when making or restoring an image? I’ve tried restoring a saved image a couple times now and the Megadrive Metadata hasn’t been re added while the SNES data has. Known issue or am I going mad?
Jamie
I’m not very experienced with either MegaDrive/SNES, could this be maybe emulator related?
hans
UPDATE 1.74
Nothing big here, just increased the delay for verifying the Sudo password.
V1.73 seems to wait a too short a time it seems, affecting some users.
Thanks BootZ for testing!
hans
[…] ApplePi-Baker […]
Having updated to El Capitan I now find that v1.74 will still write to an sd card but will not create a backup. I get a User path does not exist error message. It is looking for users/hans/desktop.
Is there a numpty type fix?
Thanks for a brilliant app.
bromerzz
Thanks Bromerzz!
Thanks for bringing up the “users/hans” goof up … I had overlooked that one.
I hope to release 1.80 shortly, I’ve had some great help and things should run even smoother in that version – it’s being tested as we speak.
hans
The Sudo version doesn’t accept my Mac password, tried it several times, even resetting the password. But to no avail… so I skipped to the non-sudo version.
This one can’t find any SD cards. It used to work previously, but since now it doesn’t work. Using an USB-card reader
Edwin
The non-Sudo version might not work with external USB card readers (it hasn’t been updated in a while, although I it should work).
If you’d like you could try ApplePi-Baker 1.80 beta …
Please keep in mind that it’s a test version in which I completely reworked the Sudo password verification and other places where the sudo password is needed. If you decide to give it a try, please report if the Sudo password issue got resolved, as I have no way to reproduce the actual problem.
hans
Hi
I have given the 1.8 beta version a go and found the following.
No problem with password sign in.
Path to the SD card is recognised.
Able to restore a backup. And the fresh image works.
Unable to create a backup – same path issue as originally reported.
OSX 10.11 El Capitan.
Hope that helps in some way.
bromerzz
Thanks Bromerzz!
That’s great news actually. The password problem was the biggest issue!
I’ll take a look at the backup function, to see if I made a booboo there or not.
hans
Thanks again, that was indeed very helpful.
I’ve uploaded a new v1.80 beta (new link, I removed the old link).
It should address the backup issue (which was a booboo on my end – sorry).
Please let me know if this one works correctly.
hans
Thanks Hans
1.80 beta new version from the post above Tested and fully functioning.
Password -no issue
Create a backup – no issue
Restote a backup – no issue
And finally the SD card itself did of course work.
Thank you very much once again.
bromerzz
Awesome!
Thanks for testing, it’s very much appreciated!
hans
Hi,
I’m attempting to run Apple Pi-Baker on a Mac desktop running OS X Yosemite, I can’t seem to get the SD cards to show up in the app. I’m using the built in SD card slot, and trying to write a Octoprint .img to my SD card for raspberry Pi. Any advise would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Arron
I downloaded an older version and it seems to be working now!
Arron
Hi Arron,
What version did you try that failed? v1.80?
It should work, so if it doesn’t work, then I’d like to investigate that and see if I can fix it.
hans
Same issue here… SD cards do not appear in the app. Using the internal SD card slot on a MacBook Pro Retina 15 mi 2015.
OS X: 10.10.5
Apple Pi-Baker: 1.80
Seb
I am also having this issue on 1.8.
Both drives I put in show up on my Mac (10.7.5) but Apple-Pi Baker isn’t reading either of them.
JORDAN
Hi Arron, Seb and Jordan,
Would you guys be able to email me the output of:
and for the USB device in that list
(where “/dev/xyz” is the device listed in “diskutil list”)
It would be helpful to determine why AppePi-Baker is failing to detect the SD card.
You can email it by replying to the notification you’ve received, or email it to webmaster at tweaking4all dot com.
hans
This might sound silly,… but did any of you try to press the “refresh” button?
Just to see if it picks up on the SD cards after a “forced” refresh …
hans
Same issue with 1.8 or 1.51, using imac SD slot, running el capitan
Rich
In 1.51 I would expect the SD card to not appear,… 1.8 however has been changed specifically for El Capitan.
I will look in to this today and see what I can find (I’m running El Capitan as well).
hans
I am also have the issue with v1.8 not seeing the built in SD reader. MBP with Yosemite 10.10.5. Here is the system info for the reader:
Capacity: 15.55 GB (15,548,284,928 bytes)
Removable Media: Yes
BSD Name: disk2
Partition Map Type: MBR (Master Boot Record)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Volumes:
UNTITLED:
Available: 15.54 GB (15,535,964,160 bytes)
Capacity: 15.54 GB (15,544,090,624 bytes)
Writable: No
File System: MS-DOS FAT32
BSD Name: disk2s1
Mount Point: /Volumes/UNTITLED
Content: DOS_FAT_32
Volume UUID: 81632065-7422-325C-8872-476A6EB0EED4
Here is the diskutil:
diskutil info /dev/disk2
Device Identifier: disk2
Device Node: /dev/disk2
Part of Whole: disk2
Device / Media Name: APPLE SD Card Reader Media
Volume Name: Not applicable (no file system)
Mounted: Not applicable (no file system)
File System: None
Content (IOContent): FDisk_partition_scheme
OS Can Be Installed: No
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: USB
SMART Status: Not Supported
Total Size: 15.5 GB (15548284928 Bytes) (exactly 30367744 512-Byte-Units)
Volume Free Space: Not applicable (no file system)
Device Block Size: 512 Bytes
Read-Only Media: Yes
Read-Only Volume: Not applicable (no file system)
Ejectable: Yes
Whole: Yes
Internal: Yes
OS 9 Drivers: No
Low Level Format: Not supported
James
[…] system and software from the Volumio Get Started page. While you are at it, download and install Apple Pi Baker as […]
[…] Win32 Disk Imager를 사용해서 Backup/Restore를 할 것이고, OSX사용자를 위해서는 ApplePi-Baker라는 훌륭한 GUI Tool 을 사용할 것이다. 또는 dd명령어도 잘 사용하여 […]
For what its worth 1.8.0 still working brilliantly on my system since the updated release on 15 Oct.
Using MBP on el Capitan 10.11.1.
bromerzz
Thanks Bromerzz!
Great to hear that and thank for the feedback!
I noticed that other report issues (except for one) with older OS X versions, so maybe there is an issue to be found there.
Back to some virtual machines and test … so far (Yosemite and El Capitan) it works great here as well …
hans
[…] Download and install Win32 Disk Imager. If you’re on a Mac, I hear good things about ApplePi Baker. […]
UPDATE v1.81:
A bug in the SD card detection has been resolved in this version.
Additional bonus: the application size has been reduced by about 30%.
hans
[…] Pi Baker which can be found here, is a setup utility used for OS X setup. It allows you to setup your SD card without using the […]
Excellent! 1.81 seems to have resolved the missing internal card reader. Thank you for an excellent application.
James
Thanks James!
Great to hear it working well for you
…
hans
[…] Apple-Pi Baker – //www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/ […]
Apple-Pi Baker reports succesful operation but cards end up empty with name RASPBERRYPI, what gives?
Henrik
Ehm, good question Hendrik
…
What function did you use?
If you used the “Prep NOOBS Card” button in the “Pi-Ingredients: NOOBS recipe” section, the this function only prepares the needed partitioning of your card; it erases the card and creates a single FAT partition for use with NOOBS.
Next step is to grab the NOOBS distribution from the Raspberry website.
Once you’ve downloaded the NOOBS zip file, extract it and copy all files to the SD card (see also this NOOBS setup link).
Does this answer the question?
hans
I used the restore function and it reported the img file was successfully restored to the sd card but in reality it was empty. Ended up using a Windows machine ugh!
Henrik
I will look into this, the SD card should not be empty after a restore and having to revert to Windows is not something I’d want to do either.
Do you have any pointers so I can reproduce this?
(ie. type of SD card, size, IMG link, etc)
hans
[…] The ApplePi-Baker (Mac) or Win32DiskImager (Windows) […]
[…] este caso tenemos suerte, ya que la gente de Tweaking4all se ha currado esta pasada de programa. Nos lo bajamos de aquí y lo […]
[…] Write image to MicroSD (ApplePi-Baker) […]
Since a few days Pi Baker 1.5.1 can’t seem to find any of the SD-cards I inserted. In Finder they are visible, so it doesn’t seem to be a problem with the card or the reader.
Edwin
Hi Edwin,
did you by any chance update to El Capitan (Mac OS X 10.11.x)?
El Capitan changed a few things when detecting devices, in which 1.51 will fail.
Did you try 1.81 ?
hans
Yes, in both cases. I did upgrade to el capitan, but not to 1.81. Now I have and all is working again.
Edwin
Cool!
hans
Never mind. Got it working again.
Edwin
Cool
hans
great! lot of help.
Tots
Thanks Tots for posting nice feedback – it’s always much appreciated!
hans
Your opening sentence ” After writing the article on “How to get an Operating System on a SD-Card“, I realized that the existing methods and tools were to my liking. ” suggests that you “like” the tools. Shouldn’t that read “… I realized that the existing methods and tools were “not” to my liking. …”?
Yes, I’m anal that way and actually read and try digest what is said or, maybe in this case, what is / was meant to be said….
In any case thanks for The ApplePi-Baker !
Nestor
You’re totally right Nestor!
I actually very much appreciate that you’ve noticed this – I right away corrected this tiny blunder.
Thanks for taking the time to report this and thanks for taking the time to write a thank-you note. It’s very much appreciated!
hans
dear all
what is wrong if apple-pi-baker does’t see my sd card in 10.11 (even after reformating the card)?
namor
Hi Namor,
there are several reasons why you might not see the SD card.
For El Capitan (10.11), you’d need version 1.81. Version 1.51 might not see the SD card since in El Capitan some internal things have changed. One of them being how the name the SD card.
Another, less likel reason, is that some users forget to press the “refresh” button after inserting the card, or when the click that button too quick. Your Mac needs a little time to identify the SD card. With some SD cards I’ve noticed that my Mac did not recognize the SD card at all, so I had to eject and re-insert it to be detected.
ApplePi-Baker should see the SD card when Disk Utility or Finder sees it as well.
Hope this helps …
hans
great tool. makes my life easier ;) thank you very much!
i’m looking forward to v2 ‘s image shrinking feature !!!!
asdf
Hi ASFD!
Yeah … about that (v2) … I have been toying with it for a bit now. It’s not easy with all the different file systems and security measurements Apple keeps adding to their OS.
But I’m not giving up!
hans
I just downloaded ApplePi, and I used it to create an image file of my Raspberry Pi SD card. The issue that I am having is that when I deploy the image to a new card, my Pi says that the image is corrupt. Has anyone seen this before; and how do I fix it?!?!? I’m at a loss right now…
Thanks,
Andrew
Andrew L Waymire
Hi Andrew,
let me see if I can help …
A few questions:
1) Did you create a regular IMG or did you use compression? (just to eliminate that compression would be the reason why something went wrong).
2) Have you used that “new” SD-Card with a RPI image before? Not all SD-Cards are equally in quality and there are a lot of “fakes” circulating (claiming a given size but really not even getting close to the indicated size).
3) Verify if the “new” SD-Card is at least the same amount of bytes as the one you made a backup from. For example one 8Gb SD-Card is not the same size as a 8Gb SD-Card from a different brand.
hans
Hans – Thank you for helping. Please see my answers to your questions below…
1. I created the backup as an IMG file.
2. The cards that I am using are identical. Kingston 8GB Micro SD cards that can included in the RP CanaKits that I ordered . The cards were pre-loaded with NOOBS, but I am trying to create a custom image that can be deployed to several other SD cards.
3. As mentioned above, the cards and kits that were ordered are all of the same make and size. I have also tried fully formatting a card to assure that overwriting is not part of the issue. Even starting with a ‘blank’ card, i still get the corrupt error after restoring the back IMG to a new card.
Any assistance you can provide me with would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Andrew
Andrew L Waymire
The exact error that I am receiving says, ‘Persistent settings partition seems corrupt. Reformat?’
Andrew L Waymire
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the info!
I’m not sure if you tried other cards – do you have an additional SD-Card, just to make sure the SD-Card is not defective?
Next thing I’d test is creating an IMG and writing it to another SD-Card using Terminal and “dd” (I found this article to give a pretty good description on how to do this from the command line). Not the way you’d always like to do this, but it might show information that can be helpful.
hans
I just wanted to thank you for making this app – AppliPi Baker is a really need application – I love how well it works. My favorite part is the progress bar and the estimated time – It’s an excellent app. Thank you SO SO MUCH!
-Jeremy
Jeremy Iglehart
Hi Jeremy!
Thank you for the kind words and compliments!
Comments like these make it so worthwhile working on apps like ApplePi-Baker!
hans
[…] a huge amount of luck with the various options suggested for a Mac. In the end came across the ApplePi-Baker – splendid stuff and highly […]
[…] pi in the past, I recommend looking up a tutorial on how to do it on youtube. You could also use Apple Pi Baker. There are many different examples of how to do this whether you are on Mac, Windows, or Linux. It […]
[…] pi in the past, I recommend looking up a tutorial on how to do it on youtube. You could also use Apple Pi Baker. There are many different examples of how to do this whether you are on Mac, Windows, or Linux. It […]
Ahoi!
WO ist denn nun der Downloadlink??? Auf AlternaticeTo.net sind eine Menge Kram, aber kein Link für Apple-Pi-Baker, nur ein EntZIPer und jede Menge Werbung.
Thomas
Thomas
Hallo Thomas,
The download link can be found above, right under “Most recent version (recommended):”.
If you have seen a misleading “download”link to an unzipper, on Tweaking4All, then please let me know (preferably with the link) as I have filed a complaint with Google that such ads are misleading.
As far as I know, Alternative.to does not provide download links.
(sorry for not replying in German)
hans
Excellent utility, thanks for this!
I’ve never done a backup with this, but decided to today. I have a 128gb USB drive and it appears to be stuck. The status bar hasn’t changed from “Freezing Pi (Backup)…” It’s been about 10 minutes, I don’t see any files written to my destination folder either. What kind of times should I expect for this process? Should I just wait longer and hope for the best?
Thanks,
Chris
Chris
Update on this one. I originally was backing up to a brand new seagate 2tb disk over usb. I figured I’d instead use my internal disk to see if that would help… it did! Backing up to my desktop as I type.
The difference is that the new seagate disk is formatted as NTFS. Since I didn’t have an NTFS driver installed yet, my mac could not write to that disk, thus it appeared to hang the process.
I’m sure once I format that new disk (or install an NTFS driver) all will work just fine.
Not sure why I didn’t think of this before, but we’re back in business. Thanks again for creating this app!
-Chris
Chris
Sorry for the late response Chris! (it’s that season haha)
And thank you for the nice feedback!
ApplePi-Baker can indeed be used for any USB drive or SD card – you’re the first one I know of that tried it with a 2Tb disk, but it should work.
Glad to hear of other purposes for ApplePi-Baker
Let me know if you run into issues.
hans
it doesn’t work on 10.11.2
Please Update… M-SATA card isn’t recognized… also if a fat32 partition already set…
asdf
What do you mean with an M-SATA card?
ApplePi-Baker is written for USB devices and for integrated SD-Card readers.
hans
Hello and congratulations for the app , is great. But after trying few times to clone my rpi micro sd card, it does not work with me, let me explain it:
I have a 16Gb card with my RPI system and some programs instaled on it. All that is just a few Mb of space on my card, so is a lot of space free in it.
I bought yesterday a micro sd card of the same sice 16Gb and same brand , so I try to clone my original RPI system and the programs in to this new one.
First issue was that keeps telling me that my original IMG of ” masterRPI ” is bigger tha the new micro sd card (IMG file 15.560.867.840 bytes and storage card is 15.548.284.928Bytes , the difference is 12.582.918 Bytes) , and give me the option to continuing or stop the proces, so I said to continuig whith it . After the monitoring shows me the message “Process Finished” I try to EJECT the card from Diskutil and not work, then I use your app to try to eject and not working too. So I close down the computer , for not extract the card manualy .Then I try the new clone of my “masterRPI” and the screen in the RPI tell me a Kernel error. Can you help me with this . Thank you
maxbcn
Hi Maxbcn,
unfortunately, 16Gb is not 16Gb when it comes to different cars models/manufacturers.
Your case illustrates this nicely (unfortunately).
On a 16Gb card, the original is 12 Mb larger than your new card, and these 12 Mb’s could just hold the vital difference for the card to work.
Unfortunately, I have not (yet) been able to build something to reduce the IMG/Partition size to the bare minimum, due to the unsupported files system (Mac doesn’t read ext file system).
There are numerous posts and article on how to reduce the partition size of your Raspberry Pi SD card. But none of them will run on the Mac and have to be run on the Raspberry Pi itself – assuming you’re running Raspbian.
Here is an example script, usually you have to first shrink the filesystem and after that shrink the partition. Quite often, you cannot resize a mounted (running) partition and a Linux machine (this can be a virtual machine, you could use for example GPartEd to resize, more info here) is needed to do this.
In the end it’s even more complicated than that: tools like ApplePi-Baker and Win32 Disk Imager, read the raw disk, even if parts are empty. So making an IMG from a resized partition will still produce a too large IMG file (in your situation).
hans
Thank you for your awenser. I will try to reduce my original card to , lets say, 14 Gb and then I will try again.
Once again excellent and thank you very much
maxbcn
You’re welcome!
And my apologies that I haven’t found a “great” build-in solution yet …
hans
Well , Hans, the solution I did is : Today I bought a micro sd card of 32GB and it solve my problem, now I have my “master RPI” img clone ,in a 32Gb card. The diference of price between the two cards is only 5 € , so is not much .
You are great !!!!! , THANK YOU
Marcos
maxbcn
Hi Marcos,
Thanks
… I wouldn’t call myself great, but I’m happy that you’re happy with ApplePi-Baker and a working solution for the issue you ran into. 
hans
I did Pi-in-the-freezer six times, of the same sd card, on the same computer, all within 3 hours, no changes were made to the SD card. The size of each IMG is: 88,080,384 bytes, 729,808,896 bytes, 1,027,604,480 bytes, 3,179,282,432 bytes, 1,350,565,888, and 788,529,152 bytes.
Each IMG should be identical. Any idea as to why each is so different?
me athome
Hi “Me AtHome”,
That does not look good! The sizes should remain identical (note: AppelPi-Baker uses “dd” that comes with your Mac, which duplicates a disk byte by byte, without even knowing if it’s anything useful or just empty space).
So I’m wondering what is going on. I’m seeing in your list 88 Mb, 729 Mb, 1 Gb, 3 Gb, 1.3 Gb and 788 Mb. That cannot be right!
The only thing I can come up with is that your SD card or SD card reader might not be reliable …
You could try the “dd” command from Terminal, but it most likely will result in the same weird inconsistency.
hans
Hi –
As you noted, users also use ApplePi Baker to put images on USB drives. It would make things even easier if the app would allow the selection of ISO files. True, it is just a matter of renaming the ISO to IMG, but after trying to load an ISO and then having to stop and go rename it, it might be nice if that didn’t need to be done.
Thanks.
Ramsey
Hi Ramsey,
I was not aware that ISO files are the same as IMG files. Does that really work with any ISO?
When I read the info online (source), then I can only conclude you’re right … even though I’m skeptical.
In a next release I could add “ISO” to the selectable sources for restoring an image, unless someone here can tell me that this might not be a good idea …
hans
ApplePi Baker primarily uses “dd” to copy the img file to the flash drive. Linux ISO’s are done the same way, except for OSX it is recommended to use “bs=1m” whereas other OS use 4M.
From this Arch Linux page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_flash_installation_media#In_Mac_OS_X
This is the command for placing the ISO on the flash drive. I used to use Terminal, but lately I’ve been using ApplePi Baker. However, first I have to change ISO to IMG or just add .IMG after .ISO to the file name in Finder.
Ramsey
Thanks Ramsey!
In the next release I’ll add “ISO” as a source.
Did you test “bs=4m” on a Mac for ISO files? Just curious, why it “bs=1m” is recommended.
hans
Oh and before I forget; do you happen to now a link where I can download a test ISO file?
I’d assume that all ISO’s will work, however … not all will result in a bootable image for a Raspberry Pi?
Do you use it for other purposes besides Raspberry Pi as well?
hans
AFAIK .img files and .iso files are slightly different, which looking at some of the results for https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=iso+vs+img will show you. Basically a .img is a raw-image of a (floppy or) hard disk (also usable on SD cards or USB flash drives), and a .iso is a raw-image of an optical (CD or DVD) disk.
However (again AFAIK) some LiveLinux DVDs have ISOs which are specially created such that they can be used as .iso files and written to DVD or be used as .img files and written to a USB flash drive, and both methods end up with a bootable media (assuming your computer’s BIOS supports booting from DVD and USB, of course). I remember many years ago, Linux projects (e.g. DamnSmallLinux) used to distribute separate files for the CD installer and the USB installer (and there was also two versions of the USB installer, depending on whether your BIOS treated USB devices as floppy disks or hard disks – but thankfully things are more standardised now) ;-)
Since the RaspberryPi doesn’t have a DVD drive, all OSes for the RaspberryPi are distributed as .img files. So for Ramsey to want to use it for .ISO files, he must be using it to write one of the aforementioned ‘special’ LiveLinux ISOs to a USB flash drive, for booting on a regular computer.
One other “unofficial” difference, is that .ISO files are typically used for LiveLinux or bootable installer images (since CDs and DVDs are read-only), whereas .IMG files can either be ‘fresh ready to go’ images, or they can also be ‘backup’ images, as created by ApplePi Baker :-)
AndrewS
Thanks Andrew,
I was thinking the same thing … but I’ll admit that I haven’t done much with ISO files in the past years, except for making bootable USB media (Windows 10, Linux).
I don’t think the Raspberry Pi reads the ISO filesystem (9600 or whatever the number is) in a way that you can boot from it either. But then again, ApplePi-Baker is usable for other purposes as well …
hans
Yes, I was creating a bootable USB drive for Linux on another computer. Linux ISO’s were designed for CD/DVD usage, but copying them to a USB drive works just fine. They boot to a fully usable version of Linux. It is just that since they were designed for read-only media, all files are written to RAM disk and lost after shutdown. That full environment then provides an installer for installing the Linux onto a device whether that is some sort of hard drive/SSD or a USB drive or flash drive.
Windows ISO’s can installed the same way, but then additional steps are needed to add a Windows compatible bootloader.
I could do all of it manually via Terminal, but it is really nice to have a utility that immediately recognizes the available USB device and only requires selecting the source file. What some utilities do in this situation is provide 2 items in the selection dialog – the default such as IMG and varieties of ZIP, then a second selection in the pop up for “all” files so the user can override the default and select any file at his discretion, regardless of whether it is recommended.
As far as Linux using bs=4M and OSX using bs=1m, I think it is just a practice developed over time. There are so many variables that enter into the correct block size, that the numbers are just rules of thumb and are actually different for about every different computer setup. The “if” input file could be a file on a device or a device itself. SSD, HDD, flash, USB whether as a source device or a device containing the source file all have different speed capabilities. Each operating system has different caching schemes which affect the optimum amount of data to read. The “of” output file or device also has the same speed issues as the source. One person’s study indicates that for his system, 1M is better than 4M. And for Linux using GNU dd, the units must be in capital letters (ie 4M) and for BSD dd which is what OSX uses, the units must be in lower case letters (ie 1m). Anecdotal evidence on OSX says that using /dev/rdisk in the dd command tends to be faster than using /dev/disk. Here is the study of different block sizes and scripts that can be run to determine the optimum one for your system: http://blog.tdg5.com/tuning-dd-block-size/
For testing purposes, any Linux ISO should work. I happened to be working with Linux Mint the last couple of days. Note: if you are using a newer computer with UEFI instead of BIOS, be sure to go to the boot menu and select the UEFI variant or the thing will not boot. The default is for a BIOS computer. I got a chance to do this several times because of a problem I was having. I could boot the USB flash drive just fine. And then run the installer to place Linux on a HDD. But then the HDD would not boot. After a lot of hair pulling, it turns out the SATA cable was crimped which affected the bootability of the SATA drive. Fixing that solved the problem. Now I’m waiting for a replacement cable.
Ramsey
Thanks Ramsey!
Well, I’ll add ISO as a format users can select. I’ll carefully assume that said users will know what to do with it.
It is pretty cool though to see that ApplePi-Baker is being used beyond it’s original purpose. I like it!
Oh and as for block sizes: with all the testing I have done with ApplePi-Baker, I have found the “bs=4m” and using /dev/rdisk give the best/fastest results. When using “bs=1m” things get significantly slower, ditto when using /dev/disk (vs /dev/rdisk).
hans
[…] fast write I/O :-) Download Tweaking4All.com – MacOS X – ApplePi Baker – Prep SD-Cards for IMG or NOOBS Regards, Tim […]
Works like a charm! Thanks for sharing it.
Harjo
Thanks Harjo!
It’s very much appreciated to get feedback like that! Awesome!
hans
Hi I thought that I could do some playing around with my Pi and made a backup with the “Create Backup” button first.
I’ve chosen a zip as compressed image. After playing and messing up my Pi… I wanted to restore my Pi but restoring the zip didn’t work…
I unzipped the zip file and saw a file named “-” (450MB) I renamed the file to tmp.img and it became a image. I restored that and It seemed to work…
But unfortunately the Pi isn’t booting properly. I still need to hook it up to a hdmi tv to see what’s wrong…
Marc
The steps you took should indeed work.
The “-” filename, as mentioned in ApplePi-Baker, is a limitation of ZIP when piping “dd” output to ZIP.
The tmp.img you have should work … are you sure the SD card is the same (or larger) size as the original SD?
Did you test another SD (some SD’s have proven to be quite unreliable)?
hans
How do you use your app to install NOOBS on an SD Card? I can install the current Raspbian IMG file using your app perfectly. But if I try to install NOOBS your app prompts me for an IMG file… selecting recovery.img seems to be the only sensible option, but the app sticks at “Baking IMG recipe” unfortunately. :)
Copying the files per the instructions on raspberrypi.org does not yield a bootable SDcard either. I have tried both methods using both the “Lite” and full NOOBS .zip files. What am I missing?
BrianH
Hi Brian,
Setting up a NOOBS requires a particular partitioning of the SD card (FAT32 partition, MBR), which is what ApplePi-Baker does when you click the Prep NOOBS button (see also Raspberry Pi NOOBS). Next step is to download NOOBS from the Raspberry Pi Downloadspage, and extract all the files to the newly created partition of your SD card. Finall you install the SD card in your Raspberry Pi, connect mouse and keyboard to the USB port, and boot the Raspberry Pi.
When you select install, the proper image will be installed.
Hope this help
hans
I tried using both the raspberrypi.org recommended formatting app, and your app to format the sd card (a 16gb Amazon Basics model FWIW.) I tried extracting the files from the zip, then copying and I tried extracting the files directly to the root of the sdcard. The odd thing is raspbian works the first time, every time. Oh well, I don’t need NOOBS. I just wanted to give it a try since it wasn’t available when I got my first pi. No big deal.
BrianH
P.S. Thanks for your app! I love that I can install Raspbian without having to look up those obscure command line paths. :)
P.P.S. I hope you don’t think I’m trying to be a pain in the ass… I am just trying to figure out why something that seems straightforward, isn’t working out that way. :)
BrianH
Yeah, strange that it hasn’t worked – NOOBS should “just work”. I realise you’re on MacOS, but did you watch the video at https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/noobs-setup/ ? It should be a very simple process to get NOOBS installed :-/
If you insert the NOOBS SD card back into your Mac after it fails to boot on your Pi, do the contents of the SD card look the same as before? Do you get any visual display at all on your Pi when it fails to boot NOOBS? (rainbow-square, error-messages, etc.)
AndrewS
Hi Brian,
Haha, no I do not consider you a pain in the ass haha … these are very legit questions in my opinion.
The NOOBS proces can be a little confusing. In my opinion a method you’d use only once, the first time you get your hands on a Raspberry Pi. After that you’d probably always use an IMG file instead.
The obscure command-line is exactly why I wrote this app for myself … haha … cool!
Glad you like the app …
hans
“The NOOBS proces can be a little confusing.”
IIRC it was designed so that it’d be installable “out of the box” by any computer, without needing exotic tools like dd, Win32DiskImager, ApplePiBaker, etc. Any suggestions on how it could be made less confusing? :-)
AndrewS
You’re right about that and to be honest: I wouldn’t know a netter way either.
hans
If you’re using a “big” card, this might be the reason it’s not working: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sdxc_formatting.md
AndrewS
It is only an AmazonBasics 16gb card. So that’s not the problem.
BrianH
EHm, nope a “big” card should work just fine as well … a Mac will use probably FAT32, unless I’m wrong and the Mac decides to use exFAT. But I have not run across a large drive, which I formatted FAT32, to be exFAT.
This Western Digital article kind-a confirms this even for El Capitan (link).
ApplePi-Baker creates 1 FAT32 partition with a MBR, so I would not expect an exFAT issue with larger drives.
You could try the suggested method in that link and see if that will work …
hans
Sorry Hans, I wasn’t implying that ApplePi-Baker was doing anything wrong, I was merely replying to the “Copying the files per the instructions on raspberrypi.org does not yield a bootable SDcard either.” part of Brian’s comment ;-)
“big” SD cards (i.e. over 32 GB) will come pre-formatted as exFAT so you need to use something like ApplePiBaker to reformat them as FAT32 first. (If you simply rely on the official SDFormatter tool, that will convert > 32GB SD cards back to exFAT again)
AndrewS
Don’t worry Andrew, I didn’t take it as such.
But you have some valid info there, exFAT vs FAT32 can be a concern when formatting large SD cards.
ApplePi-Baker actually removes everything from the SD card, and places MBR and one single FAT32 partition back.
I actually had to double check that based on the info you provided.
So no harm in double checking …
hans
[…] MacOS X – ApplePi Baker – Prep SD-Cards for IMG or NOOBS […]
[…] can then boot from it. We’re using Apple Macs here, so the software involved is called “ApplePie Baker” which takes the hassle out of burning the image correctly. If you’re using windows you […]
So put this under “defensive programming for those who have not had their coffe yet”, but if you click on “Restore Backup” without selecting a file, APB hangs.
Other than the PEBKAC thing, _LOVE_ this program!
Wilie Smithj
Hi Wilie!
Thanks for the compliment and the humor!
Besides me having to Google PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair – I like that expression now!),… Ehm I was wondering how you managed to do get APB to crash.
Which version are you using, v1.81?
…
Did you do a restore before?
When I click cancel when asked to select a file, it just goes back to the main screen.
Can you tell me the exact steps to reproduce it? I’d like to fix that
hans
OK, it’s worse than that, it won’t do anything with this particular (64G SanDisk SDSDQUIN-064G-G4) card, I’m going to have to fiddle around some more.
May not be a program error, other than not recognizing bad cards?
More News As It Happens!
Wilie Smith
You could try partitioning and formatting with Disk Utility (of your Mac), just use something like a single partition, and see the card gets recognized properly. I unfortunately do not have 64 Gb SD cards available to test, but I would not expect problems. So it may indeed be a bad card (lot’s of fake ones out there as well).
Keep us posted!
hans
Works on my laptop, so it must be an issue with my desktop. Sorry for the problem report!
William Smith
FWIW, the ETA is a NEGATIVE number, that’s getting increasingly negative (currently -668), hopefully that’s not a 32 bit counter. 8*)
William Smith
Thanks William,
Well, I’d have to check, it usually would be safe to say that one would not want to wait longer than 32,768 seconds (more than 9 hours). Something definitely goes wrong with that – I’ll check into that!
What kind of card reader to you use on you desktop? Not sure if iMac or Mac Mini have a build in SD card reader.
Could it be that the reader cannot handle anything beyond regular SD cards – like SDHC (up to 32Gb) or SDXC (up to 2Tb) …?
hans
Well, if it’s a 16-bit counter and known-to-be-inaccurate ETA estimation (see http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/estimation.png ) then I’m sure it’ll finish sooner than that.
I’ve got a late-2014 Mac Mini with built-in card reader (which backed up the image just fine {I hope?}) as my desktop, and a mid-2013 MacBook Air which I’m doing the restore on, so both of those are fully capable of talking to “big” cards. In fact, I formatted the SD card on the Mac Mini, copied the image.gz file to it, and copied it to the desktop of my MBA to do the restore.
Both Macs are running 10.11.03 and ApplePi-Baker 1.81.
And while I was typing this, the restore completed! Now to see if it actually works. 8*)
Love the program, and thanks so much for your response on the weekend!
William Smith
Haha that cartoon is hilarious!
I’ll do some testing soon and see how I can get the negative ETA … you’re probably right about the integer size. But as far as I recall I’m using a TDateTime which should work fine. I’ll check it out!
Did the restore work?
(thanks again for the compliment)
hans
Update: Restored card works just fine.
Thanks again!
William Smith
Awesome!
So I just have to go see if I can get my hands on a 64Gb card, so I can “experience” the negative ETA.
Thanks William!
hans
the program would work great if it would detect my sd card
wat
Hi Wat,
would you mind sharing your setup info?
What kind of Mac are you using? Is it an internal SD card reader, or a USB card reader?
What kind of SD card are you using? Does your Mac recognize the SD card?
Does the SD card have anything on it yet (at least an empty partition so you can test if the card works properly)?
Can you run this in terminal and post the output (if it’s a long output, please use the forum instead):
and for the SD-card in that list? (“/dev/disk3” is the SD card, on your Mac it will probably be called differently, for example “/dev/disk2”)
I’d be happy to help out …
hans
I am currently using a 2014 macbook pro, my mac does recognize my micro hc 32gb card. I have tried using a micro sd adapter with my built in slot and a usb adapter and I have tried using an empty card and it still will not show up on the list on the program. If it effects anything I am using version 1.5.1 because do not know the password for the new one.
eli watkins
Hi Eli,
which version of Mac OS X are you running and could you post the output from the 2 Terminal commands?
That’s the only way I can check what might be going wrong …
If you use 1.5.1 and El Capitan, then it indeed will not work … you’ll need to update to 1.8.1 …
hans
Thank you, for that wonderful little app!
Tobi
Thanks Tobi for taking the time to post a thank-you, it’s much appreciated!
hans
[…] Télécharger Pi Baker ici : […]
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[…] Apple Pi Baker […]
[…] Der Download des Apple Pi Bakers ist hier zu finden. […]
[…] utenti MAC possono usare ApplePi-Baker (ha bisogno di una autorizzazione SU) oppure RPI-sd card […]
Hi! Thanks for this tool. I’d always wanted to make one but never got around to a UI, just a handful of scripts.
I notice on El Capitan (10.11.3), ApplePi-Baker is spewing “sudo” processes about every second and they seem to stick around as zombies. This becomes a major problem when the max processes limit is reached and no more processes can be forked. It not only fails the backup/restore (although it reports it finished successfully) it also locks out other apps on the OS. A restart of the computer is the only good way to clean up.
I like the tool a lot but I have a lot of trouble with this behavior and thought you should know.
Regards!
Chad
Thanks Chad for notifying me about that potential issue.
Are you sure they stick around as zombies?
These “extra” processes should only trigger a data refresh, so progress of “dd” can be measured.
The locking out of other apps is not something I have experienced, could you clarify this so I can mimic what is happening?
They should stop and disappear right away. Just to be sure, I’ll run a test later today (I’m running El Capitan 10.11.4 beta).
Any input to reproduce this is most welcome.
hans
I just ran a test (writing a DMG to and SD card) and I can see only 2 “sudo” processes in Activity Monitor.
Running
does give me indeed a list of zombie processes, adding one about every second.
I used (had to look it up, so I figured; post it here, someone might find it helpful)
to count the number of processes while it’s running.
However, when I close ApplePi-Baker, after using it, they all disappear instantly.
I will look into this to see if I can force these processes to be killed right away.
I’m not sure about the app locking though – my MacBook Pro runs everything just fine while using ApplePi-Baker.
hans
I managed to find the culprit as far as zombie processes goes.
It seems that the process object needs explicit termination each time after I call that exact same object instance, otherwise it keeps creating new processes.
I’ve modified this in the code, and once a new version is ready for release, it will be included.
One thing I did observe, only with El Capitan, is that one of the calls appears to be “locking” (beachball) just before it starts – I am assuming it is related to the device becoming ready and available. I’ll dig into that issue some more. Once it starts writing to the SD/USB this temporary “lock” disappears, but a friend just confirmed that the waiting time for unlocking seems to be depending on the speed of the computer it’s running on (slow computer = longer wait).
Maybe that is what you mean with locking?
On my MBP this however only affects ApplePi-Baker, and none of the other apps that might be running.
hans
Wow! Such a speedy and thorough response!! Thanks for that.
Yes! ps is what I used. Specifically I did:
while I was running ApplePi-Baker (well after I started noticing problems).
Maybe the word “locking” was a bad way to describe it the behavior. Here’s the issue I had…
When backing up or restoring a “bigger” SD card (32GB, 64GB, etc…) or doing multiple cards without quitting ApplePi-Baker, the time it takes is long enough to generate a number of zombie sudo processes that end up reaching the max processes limit which is 709.
Use ulimit -a or ulimit -u to find out this number.
Once that limit is reached, you cannot launch any more processes. Applications that are already running will continue to run – unless they try to spawn other processes for updating, authentication, etc… These new processes can’t run since we’re already at the max process limit so the application is stuck insofar as it cannot function correctly anymore until it can spawn the needed processes.
I didn’t notice this behavior when running a single operation on a single SD card of around 4GB likely because that doesn’t take long enough for me to reach the max number zombie sudos. Also, using compression and decompression increases the time and thus increases the chance of hitting the upper limit.
Finally, the zombies do go away if I quit the APplePi-Baker app, so that’s a work around unless you’re trying work with a compressed 64GB card.
Thanks for looking into this and as I said, I truly do appreciate your app!!
Chad
Thanks Chad, and you’re welcome!
I’ve found a way to get rid of the zombie processes – however, by doing so a kind-a ruined the stability when trying to restore an image. I probably goofed up somewhere in the code, so I’ll have to take a closer look at that.
But … while doing so I bumped into a quicker start for restoring an image, so once I get stability back to what I like, I most certainly will release a new version. A peak moments it will have 5 processes running, while writing, but they will not increase, and once restore is completed they will all disappear again.
Thanks for the “ps” trick! I wasn’t that smart yet, so I just pressed arrow up and enter a few times. Your method is better for monitoring. A little strange that the activity monitor is not displaying the zombies.
I’m happy to hear you like the app – it started out with a “toy” for myself, because I was just to lazy to look up the right “dd” parameters. Considering the amount of downloads, I wish I would have thrown it in the App store. But then again, that would be taking the fun away … so I’m keeping it here for free.
I’ll tinker a little bit more, and I’ll post a message here when I have a new version available.
Just hope it won’t cause issues with older MacOS versions. With El Capitan some of the commandline statements have changed a little bit.
hans
Since you want to keep it free, why not put it on github? Then others can contribute and make pull requests to enhance your nice tool…
Jelle
Thanks for the compliment Jelle!
I have considered putting it in GitHub, but for now my experience with Github is very limited and I’m a little “code shy” …
Maybe in the future … thanks for suggesting it though.
hans
If you (or others) would like to, you can test 1.90, which I’ve made available for testing here.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
hans
Hi Hans!
I was able to use your 1.90 beta and found my issue fixed! I haven’t had a chance to try it with a bigger card yet but I will soon and I anticipate it will work equally as well there. Thanks for addressing the issue and soliciting feedback on the fix!
Regards!
Chad
Thanks Chad!
I haven’t been able to test larger cards … which reminds me that I should look into that …
.
Thanks for testing though! I’ll be traveling this weekend, but hope to come back at you on Monday
hans
[…] fourni un tutoriel complet pour se faire. Personnellement, étant sous MacOS X, j’utilise le logiciel dédié Apple Pi Baker. Une fois installé et après avoir saisi votre mot de passe à l’ouverture, il vous suffit […]
Hans
Just some feedback for you on your excellent app.
Used 1.90 to both backup and restore an Openelec 6.0.3 image on SanDisk class 10 card and no problems encountered.
On OSX 10.11.3.
Seems quicker than its predecessor.
bromerzz
Hi Bromerzz!
Thank you for posting a confirmation!
The slight speed increase is what I observed as well, it has to do with how I changed the unmounting of the disk.
hans
[…] und auch schnell erledigt. Für Mac OSX gibt es hierbei ein tolles Programm von Hans Luijten, Apple Pi-Baker, welches die SD-Karte partitioniert und formatiert und alles soweit vorbereitet, dass man die […]
Hi Hans, thanks for making this app available. I had absolutely no success with the Win32 Disk Keeper, and when I heard about your app I was ecstatic. However, I’m having an issue and hope I might bug you to think about what I can do to fix it. I’ve got an RPi v2 that has the default Raspian OS on it with several of my ham radio apps loaded. Works great. My boot disk is a SanDisk 32 GB. I place it in a SD reader attached to my iMac running OSX 10.10.4 and run your app to back it up. That works, no errors. Then I eject my SD card, place a new one (same model, same capacity) in the reader and do the restore. That also works, no error. After it has completed I eject that card and place it in my RPi. Power up the RPi and it fails half way through bootup with the following error:
End Kernel panic-not syncing: VFS:Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,6)
I have tried different blank, identical SD cards. Have tried two different SD reader/writers. Have tried using a compressed backup and a “normal” img backup. I get the same error every time I put the restored SD card in the RPi and boot it. But if I put my original SD card in, it boots fine. WTF? :-(
Any ideas?
Jim
Hi Jim,
The only time when I see that message is when the target SD was just a tad too small for the IMG.
However, you already checked that, since you’re using the same size and even the same brand and model.
I have heard rumors about this being a potential bug in the boot script – see this (old) Raspberry Pi Forum post.
They mention too boot the Pi while holding down the Shift key, so it goes into recovery mode.
And then edit the config file, something like (copied from that post!):
Change that to:
then it all works OK.
Just keep in mind that I have not tested this.
I did find another post related to that message in the Raspberry Pi forums as wel.
Please let us know how you resolved the issue … I’d be very curious as well. Unfortunately, I have not been able to replicate the error. As far as I know, it has to do with your filesystem being corrupted somehow.
hans
A reply by Andrew:
If Jim’s getting an error about “unknown-block(179,6)” then that corresponds to /dev/mmcblk0p6 (note the 6 at the end of both strings) which indicates he’s using NOOBS, so there shouldn’t be any need for him to edit his cmdline.txt
[ Quick bit of background info – in old versions of NOOBS, when installing just a single OS, it would install a FAT boot filesystem onto /dev/mmcblk0p5 and an EXT4 root filesystem onto the /dev/mmcblk0p6 partition (which explains the root= and rootfstype= parameters in cmdline.txt, which the Linux kernel (stored on the boot partition) uses to find and load the root filesystem). But some early versions of NOOBS-installed OSes had a bug in that during an update they assumed they were on a non-NOOBS install, and so reset the cmdline.txt back to root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 (which is what it would have been in a ‘standalone / raw’ install). This meant that when NOOBS tried to boot the OS, the Linux kernel couldn’t find an EXT4 filesystem on /dev/mmcblk0p2 (which is an extended partition on NOOBS SD cards) and so display the familiar “unknown-block(179,2)” error (with 179 corresponding to ‘/dev/mmcblk0’ and 2 corresponding to ‘p2’). So in these cases the fix was to revert cmdline.txt back to the original root=/dev/mmcblk0p6 ]
But as ApplePi Baker does a bit-for-bit exact clone of an SD card, I’ve got no idea why a backed-up-and-restored card would fail to boot, when the original card still boots! Very weird, and I can’t help out any further as I don’t have a Mac myself.
hans
Well, I took the easy way out – rather than fight the inevitable, I abandoned my NOOBS / Wheezy disk and built a new Jessie version of the OS. It will require that I reinstall my applications, but that’s life. After building the Jessie disk and installing a few apps, I did a backup and then a restore to a newly formatted 32 GB card. I put that one in the RPi and it booted perfectly. So I guess we can write this problem off and forget about it.
Thanks for your help, guys. And I sure do like this Apple Pie Baker!!!
Jim
Thanks Jim!
Still a little weird that the restore did cause an error, but I’m glad to hear that you can continue what you’re doing!
hans
[…] het programma ApplePi Baker (van de Nederlandse ontwikkelaar Hans Luijten) en installeer […]
Great app. Thanks for creating it
dave
Thanks Dave for taking the time and effort to post a thank-you,
…
it’s very much appreciated
hans
[…] RetroPieをSDカードに焼くための、ApplePiBaker(アップルパイベイカー)を下記サイトからダウンロードします。 //www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/ […]
[…] 而 Mac 上的最佳選擇則是 ApplePi-Baker。 […]
Thanks for the app, it’s awesome!!
I use it a lot
Alexander Perea
Thanks Alexander!
I very much appreciated that you took the time to write a “thank you” note!
Definitely a motivator to keep going!
hans
Hallo, Thanks for this great tool.
Unfortunately, the backup does not quite work!
Have a fresh set jessi and then shut down correctly. Card into the mac and ApplePi made a backup. After a few trials and tests with dm Raspi I wanted the backup import back on the map.
1. Reports ApplePi always the backup would be larger than the map! ?? Importing goes but Nevertheless. OK
2. Raspberry Unresponsive! Does not boot! Nothing! No reaction.
Fix?
robi
Hi Robi,
This typically happens when the size of the image is a little bit larger than and the size of your target (SD).
Did you use the exact same SD card (brand/model/version)?
hans
Hallo Hans,
Ja Die Karte habe ich mit Frischem Jessi bespielt, dann raspi soweit eingerichtet und als das fertig war auf dem Mac ein Backup von dieser Karte gemacht. Später dann der Versuch mit der selben Karte und eben diesem Backup.
Yes! Its exact the same card.
robi
Hmm, that’s not fun.
There are usually 2 reasons why the restore of a backup would fail (by the way: “dd” makes the backup and “dd” restores the backup, bit by bit).
– The cards are not exactly identical in size – this can sometimes even be just a few bytes of difference …
– The target card is not 100% reliable (SD cards are notorious trouble makers – sometime because of poor quality, sometimes because they are fakes).
I did hear of another scenario where backups cause problems, and I’ve heard one user running into issues when using a NOOBS backup having issues to get it to run after restoring.
Note that if ApplePi-Baker reports the image to be bigger than the SD card, then this very likely is the case! Even when it’s just a few bytes.
Can you try to restore to a bigger card (just for testing purposes)?
hans
I’ve never used ApplePiBaker myself (as already mentioned, I don’t have a Mac), but I wonder if it’d be useful if you could add a feature which could display the exact size (in bytes) of an SD card (backup) .img, and also the exact capacity in bytes of the currently-inserted SD card? Might be useful for diagnostic purposes, if nothing else! ;-)
AndrewS
Hi Andrew!
Thank you for the suggestion! I used to do that with one of the first versions, only to find out that it would clutter the interface (most of the time, these are large numbers).
I’ll add it to my “To Do” list, see if I can come up with an idea to implement this again, in a better way.
hans
[…] Installed the .img to the SD card using ApplePi-Baker. […]
[…] Si usamos OSX usaremos ApplePi-Baker … […]
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I have a problem, every time I flash a img using the software at the end of sd FAT16 is impossible to use the entire size Raspberry Pi. I’m using a micro sd 8G
Armando
Hi Armando,
I’m not sure what you mean. You have a IMG file and you can’t flash it? Or you’re trying to use a NOOBS and it won’t resize?
hans
Hi Hans
It was me who was making a mistake of basic knowledge of linux. The program works excellent. Regards
Armando
Thanks Armando!
But now worries – I’m not a Linux expert either
– Glad it works well now!
hans
FAT16 is limited to a 4GB partition size, so to make the full use of your 8G micro SD you’d need to format it with FAT32.
AndrewS
Good catch Andrew! I didn’t event think of that one
hans
Hi, Sorry if this has been covered; I haven’t come across it if it has. So…
1. Would it be possible to have a backup feature that doesn’t bit copy the entire card? The huge file sizes are playing havoc on my backup drives.
2. Also would it be possible to have some verification? I have had failed images, not sure why, but it’s left me nervous. I feel the need to flash/burn an image to CD just to check before cleaning out old backup images from my backup directory which rapidly gets huge.
Thanks for your time. Cheers
EkDor
Hi EkDor,
To answer your questions:
1) Unfortunately, your Mac supports only a limited number of filesystems. The Linux Ext (2/3) is unfortunately not one of them, which makes it very hard and complicated to make a backup in a different way.
2) The idea to add verification is not bad at all – I’ll think about that one!
In the meanwhile, I read a post on StackExchange that might be helpful. They mention 2 options:
– Mount the IMG file (your Mac can do that by double clicking the IMG file)
– By using SHA checksum comparison (but I did not get this to work on my Mac yet)
As for the checksum test, I did try MD5 as well, based on this post, but that failed under Mac OS X as well.
So, as long as there is no “easy” way to compare, it will be hard to verify.
hans
1) Would it be possible to add automatic compression / decompression to Apple Pi Baker? (see e.g. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/filesystem/backup.md but note https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/pull/336 )
Oh, looking up at the top of this page I see it does already offer that – maybe it wasn’t obvious enough for EkDor to notice? ;-)
2) The sha1sum or md5sum should work, I dunno why it wouldn’t (but those articles were written for Linux, so Mac might be slightly different!). If you’re writing e.g. a 4GB image file to an 8GB SD card, then you’d need to md5sum just the first 4GB of the SD card (in fact the exact same number of bytes) in order to get a matching MD5. One byte wrong in either direction and you’d get a totally different hash result (so the same thing applies if restoring a slightly-smaller-than-4GB img to a slightly-larger-than-4GB SD card).
I suspect the “mount IMG by double clicking” won’t work on Mac, again because of the unsupported filesystem problem…
AndrewS
Hi Andrew!
Ehm, compression and decompression is already build in, and supports several formats (incl. Zip, Rar, 7zip, tgz etc). I even added the option to extract select an IMG from an archive when there are multiple IMGs included in the archive. But I see you’ve noticed that as well haha.
One thing I have been looking into, and have yet to find an answer for, is to actually only backup the “files” (by lack of better words), so that on restore the size of the partition can be as small as the sum of the “files”. It’s a little bit more complicated than just copying the files, not to mention the lack of native support for Ext file-systems.
Yeah, doing a checksum, if I’d get it to work on a /dev/hda on a Mac, would be great. But … so far no luck. MD5 even reports “device busy” and “shasum” just replies with nothing …
As for the mounting; I forgot I installed Paragon ExtFS on my Mac, with the intend to get access to the files and see if I could get a smaller backup this way (no dice though). Sorry about that – my bad!
hans
I’m trying to install retropie onto a 32GB microSD card using osX 10.11.4. My SD reader in my macbook pro doesn’t work but the SD is plugged into a USB card reader. The app sees my SD card. I select it and then select the .gz of the newest version of retropie to restore. I click Restore Backup and nothing seems to happen. I get the old spinning beach ball and it says “waiting for recipe (idle) …” at the top.
Any thoughts on how to make that go away? Thanks.
fununcle
i switched to a mac mini that has a functioning SD slot and it’s working fine now. Does it not work with a USB sd reader?
fununcle
Hi Fununcle!
I’m sorry to hear you’re running into issues …
I made ApplePi-Baker with USB card readers in mind, so it should work.
Granted, I have tested it only with 2 USB card readers, but since it lists you USB device, it should work.
The spinning beachball, typically occurs when APB is trying to unmount the SD card in the beginning of the writing proces. Sometimes this goes super fast, but on rare occasions this takes a bit longer or almost forever. I’m not sure where the problem is caused, but I suspect that it has to do with the OS releasing the USB device …
You could try the USB card reader on your Mac mini and see if you experience similar problems there. This way we could see if it’s card-reader or OS related.
hans
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Using v 1.81 of Apple-Pi-Baker, I can’t restore Apple-Pi-Baker created backups of a NOOB based install.
• Click “Prep for NOOBS”
Yields a Fat32 partition named Raspberry on a 30.9 GB SanDisk SDDR-113 (Same results if I use Apple’s Disk Utility to format using Fat32.)
• Select a 3.4GB NewPi.gz IMG file created with ApplePi-Baker of programs installed to a NOOB based card.
• Click Restore Backup
Prepareing crust
Baking IMG recipe, the estimate is 2min but within 30 seconds I get an OS X dialog: “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”
The progress b