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I'm trying to run Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pi, following instructions from http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi. I've tried with two cards, 8 and 16 GB, but with same result: power diode is lighting (red), and nothing more - monitor displays "No signal input" and keyboard dont work even on pressing "*lock" buttons. My hardware instalation is: standard power supply, USB keyboard, monitor via hdmi <-> dvi link. Something is broken within image? After writing image on card, its filesystem cannot be detected even by kernel and GParted. Partition /dev/mmcblk0p1 is detected. I wrote image with following command:

dd bs=1M if=/mnt/pub/archlinux-hf-2013-07-22.img of=/dev/mmcblk0p1

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  • How are you writing the image to the card? The symptoms you have sound like either the downloaded image was corrupted, or you're doing something wrong when writing it
    – Gagravarr
    Commented Aug 25, 2013 at 14:21
  • I edited my post to add this information.
    – pirogronian
    Commented Aug 25, 2013 at 14:29
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    It's a disk image. You should write image to /dev/mmcblk0 not /dev/mmcblk0p1 (mmcblk0 is disk, mmcblk0p1 is partition) try dd bs=1M if=/mnt/pub/archlinux-hf-2013-07-22.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
    – gurcanozturk
    Commented Aug 25, 2013 at 15:57

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As gurcanozturk pointed out in the comments, you're writing the SD card incorrectly.

The SD card images for Arch (as well as Raspbian etc) are a whole-disk image. This means they contain the partition table at the start of the disk, then all the partitions. The need to be written over the whole disk.

On linux, SD cards show up as /dev/mmcblk# , and the partitions on them are /dev/mmcblk#p# , so the 2nd partition on the 3rd SD card (assuming lots of card readers!) would be /dev/mmcblk3p2

Your command needs to be instead

dd bs=1M if=/mnt/pub/archlinux-hf-2013-07-22.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

Once written, you should be able to do fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0 and that will show the small fat boot partition, then the arch partition after that

By trying to write to /dev/mmcblk0p1 you're putting a whole disk into an existing partition, which won't work. One way to think of what you've done is to take a letter in an addressed envelope (arch image containing arch), and put it inside the old addressed envelope!

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  • That did the trick. It took me some time searching on the internet to get around the problem.
    – Dohn Joe
    Commented May 21, 2014 at 19:46

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