Installing ROCK on NUC: Ambiguity in Roon Knowledge Base Instructions

Hi, I’m posting this so that others might not lose as much time as I did.
In the RKB, there are two paragraphs that I misunderstood and thus wasted several hours of frustration. Here they are (further comments below):

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4. Writing to a USB flash drive (from a second computer, not the NUC):

Now that you’ve downloaded the image to another computer, you will need to write this image to a USB flash drive.

Windows / Mac OS / Linux

  • Plug in your USB flash drive (it must be larger than the factory reset image size – 1GB is more than enough).
  • Download and install Etcher from https://etcher.io/
  • Start Etcher
  • From the Etcher application interface, select your .img.gz file as “the image”
  • From the Etcher application interface, select your USB flash drive as “the drive”
  • Click on “Flash!”

Linux Command Line

  • Uncompress your .img.gz file by running gzip -d roonbox-linuxx64-nuc3-usb-factoryreset.img.gz , which will leave you with a .img file.
  • Plug in your USB flash drive (it must be larger than the factory reset image size – 1GB is more than enough).
  • Run sudo dmesg to determine the device name given to your USB flash drive. It will be something like /dev/sdb .
  • Unmount any directory your flash drive was mounted to.
  • Run sudo dd bs=10485760 if=roonbox-linuxx64-nuc3-usb-factoryreset.img of=/dev/sdb (replace “ sdb ” with the appropriate device name). This can take a few minutes, depending on the speed of your USB flash drive.

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I am not wholly lacking in intelligence, but I did misinterpret the above paras to be part of a continuous set of instructions. So, having used Etcher, I then tried to use the CLI instructions.

I may be the only person who will ever make this mistake. But could they be clearer? Could there be a line that says (please do ONE of the following)?

Thank you @Will_Napier! If this is the only part that had you scratching your head you did quite well.
Indeed, these instructions should be spruced up in the KB, especially with the advent of 8th Generation NUCs where the BIOS behavior is quite different from previous generations for which it was written originally.
Credit to Roon users to get through it anyway!

Hi @Will_Napier,

Your feedback is much appreciated! I’ve updated this section to clarify that these are two different options for completing the same task.

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Thank you Scott for your encouragement, and to Dylan for such a swift and positive response.

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