Install image confusion, cannot get it to work

[cwynd]

Hello,
I have been trying to follow the instructions here, as also seen in many other places, and I am obviously confused and probably making this way more complicated than it has to be. I rarely use windows for anything, so that may be part of my difficulty.

I do have Windows 10, and download Rufus, plus the correct coreELEC 9.2 img.gz file (for my Minix U9-H).
Rufus accepts that .img.gz file as is, and appears to write it successfully to the clean SD card.

The instructions then tell me to “Browse to the Device Trees folder, now present on the SD card”, but Rufus appears to have written a linux filesystem to the SD card - as I would expect, since the img.gz is a complete linux filesystem when I look at it on my linux desktop. Windows wont recognize this file system, and wants to format the SD card again before it will touch it, so how would I do that? I doubt the above instruction expects me to remove the SD card from the reader on my laptop running windows, and move it to my desktop (Ubuntu 18) to do this - although I can do that and then find the correct dtb file, and move it. But further the SD card now has two partitions, and “the root folder of the SD card” does not specify which of these two partitions I should move it to…

Needless to say the Minix box will wisely have nothing to do with booting this mangled image.

All in all, I was looking forward to trying CoreELEC to revitalize this old hardware, but totally confused about the instructions.

Can someone enlighten me please??

*edit - grammar

[vpeter]

Unplug the SD card and plug back in. Then the folder should be visible.

[cwynd]

Thanks for responding.
My laptop has a built-in TF card reader, and I’ve now discovered that windows will not read the card written by Rufus through that reader, although it will read other SD cards fine (not sure about write).

If I put the card in a thumbdrive adapter in a real USB port I can now read it, and see the Device Tree folder, and I can move the right dtb, correctly named, to the root folder. So that’s progress!

Unfortunately the image will still not boot, but I’ve shifted the problem a bit. I suspect that if the windows SD read through that TF port is bad, the write may well also be, so I’ll try writing it again through a thumb drive adapter.

Separately, is there any problem with mounting the two partitions in linux, moving the dtb over, and dd-ing the image to an SD card? Is that likely to give me an OK image?

Thanks again

[Poida]

Using Rufus is not a compulsory step in installation (as the guide mentions), just a suggestion. Simply use a different SD writer if you are more comfortable with a different OS than Windows

[Compent]

Some SD cards themselves can be problematic, so trying a different one can also magically see things work.

balenaEtcher is another popular alternative writing tool to Rufus.