Copy Flashed Image With SD card Duplicator

Product support balenaOS
1

Hi guys,

I have a deployment coming up using about 100 devices that will run Balena (RPi Zero W’s). I am using an image downloaded off of my Balena Cloud Application, and preloading it with the latest release, then using Balena Etcher to flash it to an SD card. I then configure the image by adding a udev rule to config.json, and adding a couple devicetree overlay files.

This all works great, but I’d like to speed up the deployment process by using an SD card duplicator (SySTOR 1 to 15 Multiple SD/microSD Drive Memory Card Reader Duplicator / Copier (SYS-SD-15)) to copy from 1 sd card to 14 more, but I can only get the original card that was flashed with Etcher to actually register with Balena Cloud. I’m using the duplicator as opposed to, say, the Etcher Pro because we already had the duplicator on hand.

The SD cards themselves are identical after duplicating, but for whatever reason only the original works. Any ideas?

4

Hi, are you able to see if the Raspberry Pi Zero is able to boot up from the SD cards created using the duplicator? Best if you have a monitor and connector to see the boot sequence.

I suspect that the duplicator might not be copying the boot sector of the SD card. Were you able to try the duplicator with other bootable SD cards as well?

6

Hey there, just checking in to see if you were able to try out any of the suggestions Carlo mentioned above.