Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Flashing from OS X
If your current computer is a Mac running Apple OS X, you'll be pleased to hear that things are
just as simple as with Linux. Thanks to a similar ancestry, OS X and Linux both contain the
dd
utility, which you can use to flash the system image to your blank SD card as follows:
1.
Select Utilities from the Application menu, and then click on the Terminal application.
2.
Plug your blank SD card into a card reader connected to the Mac.
3.
Type
diskutil list
to see a list of disks. Find the SD card by its size, and note the
device address (
/dev/disk
X
,
where
X
is a letter identifying the storage device).
4.
If the SD card has been automatically mounted and is displayed on the desktop, type
diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk
X
to unmount it before proceeding.
5.
Use
cd
to change to the directory with the
.img
file you extracted from the Zip archive.
6.
Type
dd if=
imagefilename
.img of=/dev/disk
X
bs=2m
to write the file
imagefilename
.img
to the SD card connected to the device address from step 3.
Replace
imagefilename.img
with the actual name of the file extracted from the Zip
archive. This step takes a while, so be patient!
Flashing from Windows
If your current PC is running Windows, things are slightly trickier than with Linux or OS X.
Windows does not have a utility like
dd
, so some third-party software is required to get the image
file flashed onto the SD card. Although it's possible to install a Windows-compatible version of
dd
, there is an easier way: the Image Writer for Windows. Designed specifically for creating USB
or SD card images of Linux distributions, this features a simple graphical user interface that
makes the creation of a Raspberry Pi SD card straightforward.
The latest version of Image Writer for Windows can be found at the official website:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
. Follow these steps to
download, install and use the Image Writer for Windows software to prepare the SD card for
the Pi:
1.
Click the green Download button to download the Image Writer for Windows Zip file,
and extract it to a folder on your computer.
2.
Plug your blank SD card into a card reader connected to the PC.
3.
Double-click the
Win32DiskImager.exe
file to open the program, and click the blue
folder icon to open a file browse dialogue box.
