Jul 26, 2017 2 min read Raspberry pi

Mount Raspberry Pi SD card on Mac OS

Transferring large files through your local network can take a lot of time comparing to directly mount the micro SD card on your Mac.

The SD card contains a Raspbian image which has two partitions : The first one is a FAT16 (boot partition) and the second one is an ext4, which contains the Raspbian OS.

Micro SD

Ext4 journaling file system is unfortunately not readable on macOS by default. In order to read this particular filesystem, FUSE for Mac OS (osxfuse) and ext4fuse (read-only) need to be installed.

1. Installation with Homebrew

Open your terminal and install Homebrew (skip this step if you already have Homebrew installed):

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Install osxfuse and ext4fuse :

brew install --cask osxfuse
brew install ext4fuse

2. Plug your SD Card into your Mac

3. Get the partition identifier

Open your terminal.

diskutil list

Terminal diskutil

In my case : disk2s2

4. Create a mount point

sudo mkdir /Volumes/raspberry

5. Mount the SD Card

sudo ext4fuse /dev/disk2s2 /Volumes/raspberry -o allow_other

allow_other : readable by everyone

That's it. Now you can read/copy the ext4 partition files from/to your Mac!

Mounted sd card

To unmount the disk :

sudo umount /Volumes/raspberry

How about to write on a ext4 partition?

There's two solutions:

Free : Follow the instruction on the Github page of fuse-ext2. You can read/write on ext2, ext3 and ext4 partitions.
Paid : Or you can pay for extFS for Mac by Paragon Software