Installation issues

After my R-Pi OSMC stopped working due to the Realtek dongle becoming unsupported after the last update, I decided to re-purpose a R-Pi 3B+ to OSMC use.

It was running Raspbian, on a 32GB SD card.
I downloaded the loader for Windows (because I was sitting next to a Win 10 system) and inserted the SD card.
Windows, of course, wouldn’t play well, because it only saw the 45MB boot partition. Tried reformatting and now the entire card is accessible.

Run the installer, and it fails, complaining that there is an error writing to the card. Tried again, same problem.
Tried creating a file on the card myself - no problems. Tried again. Same.

So moved to MacOS. The Mac sees the entire SD card. Good.
Download the installer and run. Everything goes well until it tries to write to the card - complains of problems writing to the card. hanged the permissions on /dev/rdisk4 to rw-rw-rw- and tried again - same problem.

Looked at the log:

Sun Nov 3 14:00:20 2019 pasting admin script to process do shell script “dd if=/Users/philip/OSMC_TGT_rbp2_20190808.img of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=1m conv=sync && sync” with administrator privileges
Sun Nov 3 14:00:20 2019 waiting for finish
Sun Nov 3 14:00:34 2019 osa claims to be done…collect output and verify
Sun Nov 3 14:00:34 2019 Imaging failed!
Sun Nov 3 14:00:34 2019 Messages are:
Sun Nov 3 14:00:34 2019 stdout:
Sun Nov 3 14:00:34 2019 stderr: 0:133: execution error: dd: /dev/rdisk4: Operation not permitted (1)

In desperation, ran dd myself, keeping it simple with bs=4k and no conv option.
Worked like a charm.

Put the card in the R-Pi and it booted up with no problem.

I have no idea why the installer failed on Windows (didn’t even bother to look).
On MacOS I don’t know either - however, this is Catalina, and GateKeeper has become even more of a pain, so it’s possible that it has something to do with that.

But if failed for me on both systems. Someone maybe needs to take a look at the installer(s).

You don’t need to do this. The OSMC installer will partition the entire card.

See if anti-virus software is locking the drive and make sure you don’t run the installer from the card itself. This is a common mistake – and we can’t write to a drive with open file descriptors.

Windows - it’s a possibility, but the only anti-virus on that system is the Windows built-in stuff.
MacOS, no. and it worked doing the dd manually (as root).

After reading this I downloaded the installer and had it download the July image and put it on a SD card that already had the two partitions from an existing install on my Windows 10 PC (with MS antivirus running) and there was no issues. Just to be sure I put it in my Pi and let it actually install OSMC which it did without any hiccups.

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