mac raspberry pi dd permission denied

Posted by on 25 Nov 2012 Go to original comments

Raspberry Pi Grayscale Logotl;dr - If you get "permission denied" errors while trying to dd a raspberry pi disk image on your macbook pro, try blowing out your sd card slot to unset its "disk lock" switch. Seriously.

I love Mac's for the almost-linux environment coupled with a nice, rich, high-performance GUI. But every once in a while we Mac users have to search a couple extra error messages when we try to do more "linuxy" stuff - e.g., preparing a raspberry pi sd card.

This morning I got my HDMI cord for my pi, so I went thru the raspberry pi quick start guide including the easy sd card setup. But, even though I unmounted the disk and ran `dd` with `sudo` I still got "Permission denied"

I googled for this blog post title and found a topic on the Raspberry Pi forums, but the answer that seemed to work for most people was down at the bottom of the thread. So I'm re-posting it here, because it's funny, and so someone else having the same problem might fix it faster.

Apparently, 15" 2010 MacBook Pro's built-in SD card reader's get stuck in the write-locked position. So bust out your old Nintendo skills and give it a blow to clear it out. If you never had an NES, your weak under-trained lungs might need you to use a compressed air can instead. Pansy.

Question or comment about this post? Tell me on GitHub.

mac raspberry pi dd permission denied / groovecoder by groovecoder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA
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  1. Russ 2013-01-03 20:06:45 -0600
    Incredible. I just did like you said and blew out the SD card slot on my iMac and it worked! Thanks!
  2. Ed Daw 2013-01-21 04:36:30 -0600
    I had the same problem. In my case the memory card I bought had a lock tab on it that was getting pushed over into the lock position when I inserted the memory card into the receptacle on the pi. Once I realised this and inserted the card more carefully - no more problems. A blob of superglue might be heading in the direction of that lock tab soon!
  3. DUSTIN REEVES 2013-02-03 23:06:33 -0600
    i cant believe this, i couldnt figure out for the life of me why i was getting permission errors, my though process "im running root ?, ive unmounted the disk?, wtf?" thank you for this helpful post.
  4. Kevin K 2013-02-15 19:47:59 -0600
    If you ordered through CanaKit, be sure to try the "locked" position of your SD card. I thought the above was my issue but apparently, the lock switch was put in backwards in the card shipped with my kit!
  5. Ronnie H 2013-05-18 13:14:37 -0500
    Hah, blowing the dust out of the SD card slot worked for me also. Thanks for the tip! And thanks for the flashback of the Nintendo days :)
mac raspberry pi dd permission denied / groovecoder by groovecoder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA