On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Andy Holyer wrote:
> On 6 Aug 2004, at 18:25, Aaron wrote:
> >
> > Can I format the CF card using a card reader under OS X? Is there 
> > something else I can do?
> >
> It works fine, but you have to jump through a few hoops to get round OS 
> X's automatic mounting of cards.
> 
> What you do is:
> 
> Plug the card in via the card reader. Use the Disk utility to see where 
> it's been mounted - different brands of card seem to come up as 
> different disks, but usually it's something like /dev/disk2 or 
> /dev/disk3.
> 
> Unmount the card, if Os X has mounted it - you can use Disk Utility to 
> do this.
> 
> Since Disk Utility can read .iso images you should be able to use that, 
> but I haven't got that to work, so I have to use terminal.

For the CF-based platforms it's not an ISO image, it's a BSD-partitioned
disk image.

> Run a terminal, su to root, so you can write to the card and do the 
> same as the Unix instructions say:

su to root?  You haven't set up sudo?

> # pkunzip <mono iso file> | dd of=/dev/disk2 bs=16K

I don't use a pipe.  I gunzip it to a file, so I can not only write the
file to the card, but also read it back and compare it.  When reading
back, you need to specify the length with "count=XXX" (typically the same
number of records it claimed to have written).

I also found that my reader/writer didn't work properly with the "bs=16k",
but did with the default 512-byte blocksize.  I don't recall whether I was
using /dev/diskX or /dev/rdiskX, though.

> (Assuming the card appeared as /dev/disk2).

And be sure to get the device representing the whole card, rather than a
partition.  Things like "/dev/disk2s3" are partitions.

					Fred Wright