How to write image to SD card

Question

I am following the RidgeRun documentation: How to boot a board from a SD card. I disable Nautilus from auto-mounting file systems to avoid a possible race condition and build the SD card image. I am not quite sure about step 4, "Insert a SD card in your PC and wait until it is mounted" but I see /dev/sdb1 only when the SD card is in so I assume /dev/sdb1 is my SD card and is mounted. When I type "mount" as suggested in step 5 I don't see anything like this

'''/dev/sdb1''' on /media/boot type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,flush)

but I do see this

/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
none on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
none on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
rpc_pipefs on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/jnadelman/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=jnadelman)

Assuming nothing needs to be unmounted I do a

sudo dd if=sdcard.img of=/dev/sdb1

and see

262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 50.8677 s, 2.6 MB/s

so I move the SD-card from the PC to the Leopardboard, turn ON dip switch 2, and power on the Leopardboard but don't see any console activity. Moving the SD-card back to the PC I don't see anything in /media so I turn auto-mount back on and look with nautilus but still don't see anything. I think sdcard.img has been written to the bit bucket but can't be sure. I have been able to run this image using NFS but I need to be able to run it from the SD-card. Is the RidgeRun SD-card documentation incorrect or incomplete? How do I write sdcard.img?

Solution

To write an Image to a sdcard, you CANT write it on a partition (in that case sdb1) you've to put to the sdcard itself.

sudo dd if=sdcard.img of=/dev/sdb

Might works.

Comments

[mikewhatever]

Methinks, the question is off topic, in other words, unrelated to Ubuntu or derivatives.

[mikewhatever]

Well, the point is, dd works the same on all distros.