Copy RaspBSD image to micro SD card

The RaspBSD image for Raspberry Pi can be found at http://raspbsd.org/raspberrypi.html.

After it’s been downloaded, we need to copy it to a microSD card. Before we can do that, we need to find out the device name represents the microSD card. One way to find out is to plug the card in, and check the newest messages of dmesg.

$ dmesg
...
[282430.689656] mmc0: new SDHC card at address aaaa
[282430.691039] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SU08G 7.40 GiB 
[282430.711060] mmcblk0: p1 p2

In my case, using Ubuntu 15.10, the card is detected as mmcblk0.

Now, we’re ready to copy the image into the microSD card.

$ gunzip FreeBSD-armv6-11.0-RPI2-290555.img.gz

$ sudo dd bs=1m if=FreeBSD-armv6-11.0-RPI2-290555.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

$ sudo sync

If you want to see the progress while running dd command, you can use dcfldd instead:

$ sudo dcfldd bs=1m if=FreeBSD-armv6-11.0-RPI2-290555.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
30464 blocks (952Mb) written.
30517+1 records in
30517+1 records out

$ sudo sync

I’m not sure if sudo sync is mandatory, but I ran it anyway. That’s it!