Find specific attached disk, not volume, by Applescript
I have a script I use to format any inserted SD card, copy data from specific folders to it, then eject.
Each format/copy is triggered manually, as part of a batch process involving maybe a hundred or so cards, so I'm not concerned about hitting the Start button at the wrong time, or on the wrong card.
What I am trying to find is how to make absolutely sure that I'm writing to the correct disk
This is my 'important' linedo shell script "diskutil eraseDisk \"MS-DOS FAT16\" " & diskName & " MBRFormat disk6"
The disk6 is not absolute, as I don't always have the same number of drives mounted. I can check it manually before I start the batch, using diskutil list then change that parameter in the script.
What I'd like to be able to do is have the script itself check what drive it ought to be, then insert that as a variable, avoiding any 'wrong choices'.
Excluded drives would be non-removables & RAM Disks [presumably unmounted volumes such as EFI & Recovery wouldn't need to be filtered] - these have known volume names - but I cannot figure out how to set a found volume name [known or unknown, as the SD cards can be called pretty much anything before I start] to a specific disk number.
Specifics on the card reader, built into my monitor, Dell U2713H
Attached over USB2 from a Mac Pro 4,1 [with 5,1 hardware update]
USB Hi-Speed Bus:
Host Controller Location: Built-in USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBEHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x3a3c
PCI Revision ID: 0x0000
PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086
Bus Number: 0xfa
Hub:
Product ID: 0x8043
Vendor ID: 0x0451 (Texas Instruments)
Version: 1.00
Serial Number: 79000089BFB9
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Location ID: 0xfa200000 / 2
//snips other devices//
USB3.0 Card Reader:
Product ID: 0x0307
Vendor ID: 0x0bda (Realtek Semiconductor Corp.)
Version: 1.63
Serial Number: 201006010301
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Realtek
Location ID: 0xfa233000 / 5
Sample output of df
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s2 1950314272 485618064 1464184208 25% 60766256 183023026 25% /
devfs 412 412 0 100% 714 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s2 3906357344 1195025808 2711331536 31% 149378224 338916442 31% /Volumes/JuSpace
/dev/disk3s2 1951855464 635192376 1316663088 33% 79399045 164582886 33% /Volumes/Downloads
/dev/disk2s2 5858067520 2309215360 3548852160 40% 144325958 221803260 39% /Volumes/OhDaSpace
/dev/disk4s2 5753889792 4638480736 1115409056 81% 289905044 69713066 81% /Volumes/TMach
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% 0 0 100% /home
/dev/disk3s4 408324240 210669592 197654648 52% 200589 98828207 0% /Volumes/MacWin7
/dev/disk5 2097152 700536 1396616 34% 87565 174577 33% /Volumes/RAM Disk
/dev/disk7s1 1936768 104192 1832576 6% 512 0 100% /Volumes/F_CARD
Or...
Using ioreg -l with the following result
| | | | +-o Generic- SD/MMC/MS/MSPRO Media <class IOMedia,$
| | | | | {
| | | | | "Removable" = Yes
| | | | | "Content" = "FDisk_partition_scheme"
| | | | | "Whole" = Yes
| | | | | "Leaf" = No
| | | | | "BSD Name" = "disk7"
how do I fix something like grep -A 100 SD/MMC/MS/MSPRO Media | grep disk | awk... to find the disk7
I'm not that great in writing Apple scripts but here is an idea how to solve your problem.
In the first method outlined below I search the device tree of system_profiler to get the DiskIdentifier of a disk device attached to the USB3 card reader built into your Dell monitor. In the second method I use ioreg.
system_profiler:
To get the DiskIdentifier of a SD-card attached to the external SD-Reader use something like:
system_profiler -detailLevel mini | grep -A 30 0x0307 | awk '/disk/ {gsub("BSD Name:", ""); print $NF}'
with grep -A 30 0x0307: output the next 30 lines after finding the string 0x0307
and awk '/disk/ {gsub("BSD Name:", ""); print $NF}' to get the disk number but remove BSD Name: from the output.
The command takes about 10 seconds on my system.
You may have to adjust the value of -A and the characteristic string (in the example above I used your USB3.0 Card Reader Product ID: 0x0307). Check the device tree with the app System Information and search for an appropriate string.
Wrap all that in a variable like $SDDiskToErase and hand it over to your diskutil eraseDisk command.
Using the above slightly modified line I got the diskIdentifier (disk2) of an external USB disk directly attached to my Mac:
system_profiler -detailLevel mini | grep -A 30 0x1c26 | awk '/disk/ {gsub("BSD Name:", ""); print $NF}'
disk2
ioreg:
Another initial command is ioreg -l | grep … (… is similar to the above) which is much faster (less than a second).
Attach an SD-card and get its DiskIdentifier with diskutil list. Then make a dump of ioreg with ioreg -l > ~/Desktop/ioreg-dump.txt.
Search in ioreg-dump.txt for the diskIdentifier found above. The disk is connected to a superior controller (the one in your monitor) visualized by the long vertical and short horizontal "lines" on the left in the dumb file. Use a characteristic and unique string of the controller like a serial number, IOName, deviceID etc. Then choose a number of subsequent lines for -A big enough to contain the diskIdentifier (e.g. disk6) but small enough not to contain the volume identifiers (e.g. disk6s1).
Example:
ioreg -l | grep -A 350 0x100000214 | awk '/disk/ {gsub("\"",""); print $NF}'
disk2
To use the command in Apple Script you have to escape all inner " and \:
"ioreg -l | grep -A 10 SD/MMC/MS/MSPRO | awk '/disk/ {gsub("\"",""); print $NF}'"
becomes:
do shell script "ioreg -l | grep -A 10 SD/MMC/MS/MSPRO | awk '/disk/ {gsub(\"\\\"\",\"\"); print $NF}'"