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Volumio on a Mac

deebster

deebster

Half Man Half Biscuit
Having managed to get Logitech Media Server running on an old Mac mini without a squeezebox I got cocky and thought I'd have a go at running Volumio on an even older one that was lying around. I'm close but not quite there yet so was hoping for a for a little help from the pfm massive.

It's a 2006 Core Solo mini with 2GB RAM. Using Etcher I've flashed volumio to an SD card but I can't get the mini to boot from it. The SD card was erased and formatted as FAT32 with a Master Boot Record map, which I think is right (GUID map didn't work the first time I tried, before I remembered the different options).

When holding the option key at bootup I don't get the choice of the SD card, so I must have done something wrong. When booted into OS X and trying to mount the SD card the 'Unrecognized volume' message pops up, which I wasn't expecting as a simple FAT32 volume should be always recognisable I'd thought.

Any clues chaps?
 
I've not had my hands on that model however try to boot from a USB connected hard drive or optical drive. I have a 2010 Mac Mini and it wouldn't boot a Windows installation DVD from the internal drive. It spun up and then spatted it out. However it did boot the same disk from an external USB optical drive and installed Windows.

I also have an old Mac Mini with the IBM Power PC CPU pre Intel. It was said that you couldn't boot it from a USB hard drive but I did just that. Bit of a pain but it works.

Cheers,

DV
 
Nope, not getting anyhere fast.

I FAT32 formatted an old 40GB drive in a USB case and tried to flash volumio to it but Etcher just kept on reporting that something went wrong and stopping. It's not exactly rocket science to use Etcher so I presume the issue is in some way down to the drive and/or its format.

Going back to the SD card - and after some searching on format as the question just didn't appear to have been asked much - I came across a post that suggested rather than Disk Utility using a dedicated SD card formatting app downloaded from the SD card website (the name escapes me for now but a wiki/info type site rather than any software developer). That formatted the card with no issues but then I came up against the same problem on Etcher, so failed to even get as far as flashing volumio to it.

I might try again when I'm in need of some more pain in my life but for now I think I'll concede defeat.
 
deebster said:
I might try again when I'm in need of some more pain in my life but for now I think I'll concede defeat.
Click to expand...

Sometimes banging your head against the wall can be quite therapeutic in that it distracts from other things ('just a quick 10 minute job' turns into 'three days later...'), but equally sometimes it is just banging your head against the wall and it's quite pleasant when it stops.
 
I`m using a ssd with Volumio and an old laptop, maybe its overkill, but the ssd was old enough and I hadn`t any sd card around.
I formatted using an external usb case and etcher, but maybe Rufus is better..
 
Just successfully copied the volumio image to an old 320GB hard drive using disk image writer in Linux It didn't take long. The disk was MBR with no partitions but after imagining it had 3 partitions and loads of free space.

What computer hardware is being used to copy the .img to a disk drive?

I once for fun had Volumio, El Capitan and Windows 10 Pro all on the same external USB hard dive and could boot any one of them using startup manager on a 2010 Mac Mini.

Cheers,

DV
 
Using a 2009 mini on 10.11.6, which is my youngest Mac.

Yeah, I've got a few external disks that have multiple partitions in different formats and used to use Disk Utility to make bootable images back in the early days of OS X. Also used it to restore an image of the 10.6 install DVD to a second partition so I could get it on this volumio test mini, with the idea being to get volumio on the other and have dual boot, so I had expected to be able to do this. That's why the toys have been thrown out of the pram a bit.
 
I think I know what is stopping Etcher. To test my idea out I used OS X 10.11.6 to copy the latest x86 volumio to a 320GB USB connected Hard drive.

First bring up Disk Utility and start afresh and erase your USB hard drive as exFAT and MBR and give the volume a meaningful name. Then unmount the named volume and it will grey out. Now you'll find that Etcher performs the copy quite quickly and you'll have a volumio disk with 3 partitions and mine were FAT 511MB, 3GB ext4, 379MB ext4 and a large amount of free space.

Failure to unmount the USB drive results in the error message that you have been getting.

I spotted this as I was about to show you how to use the DD command in terminal and for this to work the destination drive has to be unmounted otherwise DD complains that the device is busy.

Cheers,

DV

PS for some reason the Etcher copy process converts the USB MBR disk into a corrupted GUID! However it does boot Volumio on my 2010 Mac Mini.
 
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Lovin' your work oh Chosen One. Thank you.

Not only has unmounting before flashing worked, as I type volumio is booting up.

The only downside is that this is on my usual audio mini, a 2007 Core 2 Duo, as the 2006 Core Solo just refused to boot from the external USB drive volumio is on. Ho hum, guess it's too old even for that.

Right, off to find my way around now.
 
The 2006 Core Solo is too old. It has a 32 bit architecture and Volumio is 64bit only. You could run Linux but you still have some pain as 32 bit Linux has an x64 EFI/BIOS boot but there is a work around if necessary or Snow Leopard OS which is useful because of Rosetta. It really is end of life unless you have an important application that will only run on such a machine. I am in a similar position with some old but working IBM Thinkpads. The only OS that will run properly is Windows XP and its office suit. Even the old web browsers that run in XP are no longer compatible with todays web servers. Its a pity as they are working machines and it seems wrong to send them to landfill.

Cheers,

DV
 
Oh well, it's had a good innings.

Quite liking volumio. Very snappy to navigate, using a mouse rather than via the web interface. No Qobuz though? At least not without subscribing or some network wizardry it seems.

Is this why folks shell out for Roon, to combine all of this stuff through one interface?
 
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deebster said:
Oh well, its had a good innings.

Quite liking volumio. Very snappy to navigate, using a mouse rather than via the web interface. No Qobuz though? At least not without subscribing or some network wizardry it seems.

Is this why folks shell out for Roon, to combine all of this stuff through one interface?
Click to expand...

In fairness to Volumio, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper for the paid version with streaming integration than it is for Roon. But then people pay for a lot more in Roon too - the notes, links per personnel, browsing flexibility and so on.

I gather Volumio are re-doing their Tidal integration at the moment, so I suppose Qobuz might well be part of the revision too.

Since some of the Roon features I’d like don’t work that well for me, when my Roon sub is up I plan on trying the free trial of the paid tier of Volumio to see how it compares.
 
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