Installation fails on Mac OSX 10.10.4 using qt_host_installer.app

Hi!

I stumbled upon this thread, because I had the exact same problem: failing installer, ‘unreadable disk’-message, missing space on a formatted card. So I also suspected a faulty SD card. However, that wasn’t the case…

I tried 3 different SD cards:

  • some 8GB Micro SD hc class 4
  • SanDisk 32GB micro SD ULTRA Class 10 UHS-I (hardly used)
  • Samsung 32GB micro SD EVO+ Class 10 UHS-I (brand new)

With 2 different ‘setups’:

  • with SD-card adapter, directly in my Mac’s SD-slot
  • with SD-card reader, connected via USB

Neither of the 6 combinations worked, each setup resulted in the ‘could not mount’ error message in the installer.

But… I managed to setup OSMC (for RPi 2b) by doing a manual installation.

I couldn’t find a compact and complete howto, so I’ll share the steps and info here.

manual installation

If it’s not FAT32, you can format your SD commandline (didn’t need to do this myself):

diskutil list

find the location, e.g. /dev/disk2

sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 MYSDCARD MBRFormat /dev/disk2
  • now download the disk-image on Download - OSMC
  • be sure to pick the correct one! (in my case the Raspberry Pi 2 / 3 version, otherwise your Pi will be stuck on the rainbow-bootscreen. Trust me, I know :grimacing: )
  • I used Etcher https://etcher.io/ to burn the image to the SD card
  • Plug in the SD-card in your Pi and complete the setup!

I hope this info can be helpful to other users with the same issue.

By the way, I used the installer about a year ago on the 8GB card and it worked like a charm then. So it looks to me like it’s a problem with this version of the installer.