RPi Easy SD Card Setup

=SD card setup= The Raspberry Pi will not start without a properly formatted SD Card, containing the bootloader and a suitable operating system. Many problems with booting the Pi are a result of an improperly formatted or corrupted card. Make sure that you insert the card before powering on the Pi, and that you shutdown the Pi before unplugging the card. If you do have problems booting the Pi, see the trouble shooting page first.

You will also need to choose a distribution. Available distributions are shown here; you will need the RPi bootloader to launch your distribution, so you need one for the Raspberry Pi and cannot download a PC based distribution and use that. Note that you can have several SD Cards with a separate distribution on each, then power off, swap cards and restart the Pi to use that card.

Some Raspberry Pi kits will come with a ready-to-go card with the distribution pre-installed, or these can be bought separately. There is more on this below.

If you don't have a pre-installed card you will need to prepare your own. Make sure you get a reasonable quality card rather than a cheap one. Check the SD Card list if you are not sure. Warning! When you write the Raspberry Pi image to your SD card you will lose all data that was on the card. Official images are available from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.

'''Note: It is highly recommended that you start with the latest official Raspbian distribution: check the Raspberry Pi official website (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads) for the current version. This includes the latest bug fixes and ensures you will not spend time dealing with problems that have already been fixed, or having to apply updates. Once you have tried the latest Raspbian build you can then move on to trying other operating systems if you so wish.'''

= Safe / Easy way = Buying a preloaded SD card from a reputable supplier means that you can just plug it in and power up your Raspberry Pi; it should then just work. If you don't buy one of these, you will have to create your own using the instructions below

You may need to perform an upgrade of the card once you have got the Pi working, as a distribution (usually) is continuously updated and the card may not contain those updates

Compare these for prices, delivery, distribution and card size/class:


 * RS Components


 * Element14 (Farnell)


 * The Pi Hut's Raspberry Pi Store offer SD cards preloaded with either:
 * Raspbian.
 * OpenELEC XBMC.


 * ModMyPi Sell high quality Samsung SD cards pre-loaded with the latest Raspian Wheezy OS.
 * 8GB Raspian Wheezy Pre-Loaded
 * 16GB Raspian Wheezy Pre-Loaded
 * 32GB Raspian Wheezy Pre-Loaded

Public Service Announcement on SD Cards. There have been reports of problems with SD cards purchased from ebay and Amazon. Make sure the SD card you're purchasing is up to date with the latest version of your chosen operating System to avoid any issues.

= Create your own = To create your own SD Card for the Raspberry Pi you will need access to another machine, or a friend with one. You will need to be careful, as you could corrupt the disk on that machine if you do things wrong (although it is not hard to do it right). If you are lucky, you might find a local Raspberry Pi or Linux group who will offer to load your card for you.

You will also need to choose and download a distribution (mentioned above). Check the Distributions list to make sure that you are getting a distribution that will work with the Pi. Note that the distribution must be written to the card using the methods below; the standard file copy method will not work

Using the Win32DiskImager program
''In Windows, the SD card will appear only to have a fairly small size once written - about 55 to 75 MB. This is because most of the card has a partition that is formatted for the Linux operating system that the Raspberry Pi uses which is not visible in Windows. If you don't see this small directory with files such as kernel.img then the copy may not have worked correctly.
 * 1) Download the distribution from the raspberrypi.org downloads page or from a mirror or torrent. Make sure the distribution is for the Raspberry Pi, as others will not work. Usually these are zipped (compressed) files ending in .zip or .gz (something like "distribution-name.zip").
 * 2) Extract the image file from the downloaded .zip file, so you now have "distribution-name.img".
 * 3) Insert the SD card into your SD card reader and check what drive letter it was assigned. You can easily see the drive letter (for example G:) by looking in the left column of Windows Explorer. You can use the SD Card slot (if you have one) or a cheap Adapter in a USB slot.
 * 4) Download the Win32DiskImager utility (it is also a zip file). You can run this from a USB drive. Win32DiskImager.png‎
 * 5) Extract the executable from the zip file and run the Win32DiskImager utility; you may need to run the utility as Administrator! Right-click on the file, and select 'Run as Administrator'
 * 6) Select the image file you extracted above.
 * 7) Select the drive letter of the SD card in the device box. Be careful to select the correct drive; if you get the wrong one you can destroy your data on the computer's hard disk! If you are using an SD Card slot in your computer (if you have one) and can't see the drive in the Win32DiskImager window, try using a cheap Adapter in a USB slot.
 * 8) Click Write and wait for the write to complete.
 * 9) Exit the imager and eject the SD card.
 * 10) You are now ready to plug the card into your Raspberry Pi. See RPi_Hardware_Basic_Setup for the other things you need.

Using flashnul (if Win32DiskImager isn't successful)
You may not be able to choose the device in Win32DiskImager on some notebooks so this is a different way to achieve the same thing on a Windows machine.

C:/flashnul/flashnul.exe -p Available physical drives: 0      size = 250059350016 (232 Gb) 1      size = 1990197248 (1898 Mb) Available logical disks: C:\ D:\ E:\ F:\ Press ENTER to exit. C:/flashnul/flashnul.exe E: -L C:/temp/distribution-name.img Where C:/flashnul/flashnul.exe is the location of the flashnul program; E: is the drive you want to overwrite, and C:/temp/distribution-name.img is the location of the .img file.
 * Download the distribution from the | raspberrypi.org downloads page or from a mirror or torrent. Make sure the distribution is for the Raspberry Pi, as others will not work. Usually these are zipped (compressed) files ending in .zip or .gz (something like "distribution-name.zip").
 * Extract the image file from the downloaded .zip file, so you now have "distribution-name.img".
 * Insert the SD card into your SD card reader and check what drive letter it was assigned. You can easily see the drive letter (for example G:) by looking in the left column of Windows Explorer. You can use an SD Card slot in your computer (if you have one) or a cheap Adapter in a USB slot.
 * Download the flashnul software from http://shounen.ru/soft/flashnul/ ; here is the English Translated version with a link to instructions (also translated)
 * Download the latest version. At the time of writing it was flashnul-1rc1.
 * Extract the application from the archive.
 * Click Start button > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt, right click on it and Run as Administrator.
 * Run flashnul with argument "-p":
 * Flashnul will tell you something like this (it should be different, as it depends on the drives on your machine):
 * Use the Load option of flashnul to put the image file on the SD Card. Make sure that you use the correct drive letter for the SD Card as that drive will be overwritten!
 * Flashnul will give you a device summary and a caution message. Check the information to make sure you have selected the correct device, then type yes and press enter.
 * If you get an access denied error, make sure to close all explorer windows or folders open for the device, then try re-plugging the SD card.

Using the Fedora Remix Installer
Download the installer program from Fedora ARM Installer. This will download and install the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix images, but it will also install other images if they are already downloaded and in uncompressed or .gz format. This also works with Linux.

Using Mac OSX
Note: In OS X each disk may have two path references in /dev: On a Class 4 SD card the difference was around 20 times faster using the rdisk path.
 * /dev/disk# is a buffered device, which means any data being sent undergoes extra processing.
 * /dev/rdisk# is a raw path, which is much faster, and perfectly OK when using the dd program.

Run an App (Only with graphical interface)
RPi-sd card builder The RPi-sd card builder utility is a app which will walk you through the process of installing to SD card. Note: This is a closed source app which requires your root password.

PiWriter PiWriter is a simple wizard made using shell scripts, PlatyPus and CocoaDialog. To prevent users from making mistakes the wizard auto-detect's the SD card you plan to use and prevents you from selecting your system disk. Also there is no need for a root password so even less damage can be done. Note: This app is open source (BSD license) so use, copy, spread and fork as you please ;)

Pi Filler
 * Pi Filler is a GUI wizard for copying a Raspberry Pi operating system image file to an SD card without needing Terminal. It automatically identfies your SD card (and asks for confirmation so the wrong disk doesn't get written to), and shows estimated time remaining during the copy. After it's done, if your Pi is not connected to a display, you can use Pi Finder to connect to it from Terminal. Both utilities are written in AppleScript and won't trigger Mountain Lion's "unidentified developer" warnings (WTFPL license).

Using system tools (mostly graphical interface)

 * 1) Download the image from a mirror or torrent
 * 2) * http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
 * 3) Extract the image by double clicking on the download file
 * 4) Connect the SD card reader with the SD card inside; note: must be formatted in FAT32!
 * 5) From the Apple () menu, choose About This Mac, then click on More info...; if you are using Mac OS X 10.8.x Mountain Lion then click on System report.
 * 6) Click on USB (or Card Reader if using an in-built SD card reader) then search for your SD card in the upper right section of the window; click it, then search for BSD name in the lower right section: must be something like diskn where n is a number (for example, disk4). Note this number
 * 7) Unmount the partition so that you will be allowed to overwrite the disk by opening Disk Utility and unmounting it (do not eject it, or you have to reconnect it). Note: On Mac OS X 10.8.x Mountain Lion, "Verify Disk" (before unmounting) will display the BSD name as "/dev/disk1s1" (or similar), allowing you to skip the previous two steps.
 * 8) From the Terminal run:
 * 9) * sudo dd if=path_of_your_image.img of=/dev/diskn bs=1m
 * 10) * Remember to replace n with the number that you noted before!
 * 11) Wait a LONG time! (or see the note above about using /dev/rdisk#...)
 * 12) You're done! Insert it in the Raspberry Pi, and have fun

Using command line tools (1)

 * If you are comfortable with the command line, you can image a card without any additional software. Run:
 * diskutil list
 * identify the disk (not partition) of your SD card. e.g. disk4 (not disk4s1)
 * diskutil unmountDisk /dev/
 * e.g. diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
 * sudo dd bs=1m if= .img of=/dev/
 * e.g. sudo dd bs=1m if=2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk4
 * (This will take a few minutes)

Using command line tools (2)
Note: Some users have reported issues with using Mac OS X to create SD cards.
 * 1) These commands and actions need to be performed from an account that has administrator privileges.
 * 2) Download the image from a mirror or torrent
 * 3) * http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
 * 4) Verify if the the hash key is the same (optional), in the terminal run:
 * 5) * shasum ~/Downloads/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.zip
 * 6) Extract the image:
 * 7) * unzip ~/Downloads/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.zip
 * 8) * (or: just double click the zip, it will extract automatically)
 * 9) From the terminal run df -h
 * 10) Connect the SD card reader with the SD card inside
 * 11) Run df -h again and look for the new device that wasn't listed last time. Record the device name of the filesystem's partition, for example, /dev/disk3s1
 * 12) Unmount the partition so that you will be allowed to overwrite the disk:
 * 13) * sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1
 * 14) * ''(or: open Disk Utility and unmount the partition of the SD card (do not eject it, or you have to reconnect it)
 * 15) Using the device name of the partition work out the raw device name for the entire disk, by omitting the final "s1" and replacing "disk" with "rdisk" (this is very important: you will lose all data on the hard drive on your computer if you get the wrong device name). Make sure the device name is the name of the whole SD card as described above, not just a partition of it (for example, rdisk3, not rdisk3s1. Similarly you might have another SD drive name/number like rdisk2 or rdisk4, etc. -- recheck by using the df -h command both before & after you insert your SD card reader into your Mac if you have any doubts!):
 * 16) * For example, /dev/disk3s1 => /dev/rdisk3
 * 17) In the terminal write the image to the card with this command, using the raw disk device name from above (read carefully the above step, to be sure you use the correct rdisk# here!):
 * 18) * sudo dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk3
 * 19) * if the above command report an error(dd: bs: illegal numeric value), please change bs=1M to bs=1m
 * 20) * (note that dd will not feedback any information until there is an error or it is finished, information will show and disk will re-mount when complete. However if you are curious as to the progresss - ctrl-T (SIGINFO, the status argument of your tty) will display some en-route statistics).
 * 21) After the dd command finishes, eject the card:
 * 22) * sudo diskutil eject /dev/rdisk3
 * 23) * (or: open Disk Utility and eject the SD card)
 * 24) Insert it in the Raspberry Pi, and have fun


 * (Mac) The RasPiWrite utility is a python script which will walk you through the process of installing to SD card, it works with any Raspberry Pi compatible disk image, and can download one of the currently available distros if you don't have one.

Using ImageWriter (graphical interface)
If you are using Ubuntu and hesitate to use the terminal, you can use the ImageWriter tool (nice graphical user interface) to write the .img file to the SD card.


 * 1) Download the zip file containing the image from a mirror or torrent
 * 2) * http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
 * 3) Right click the zip file and select "Extract here"
 * 4) * ATTENTION: As of this writing (15 June 2012), there is a bug in the ImageWriter program that causes it to fail if the filename of the image file or its path (i.e. all the names of any parent folders that you extract the image file into) contain any space characters. Before going any further, ensure that neither the file name of the image you're using or the path contain any spaces (or other odd characters, for that matter). A bug has been opened for this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/usb-imagewriter/+bug/1013834 Once the issue is fixed, edit this page to advise people to use an updated/patched version of ImageWriter.
 * 5) Insert the SD card into your computer or connect the SD card reader with the SD card inside
 * 6) Install the ImageWriter tool from the Ubuntu Software Center
 * 7) Launch the ImageWriter tool (it needs your administrative password)
 * 8) Select the image file (example 2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img) to be written to the SD card (note: because you started ImageWriter as administrator the starting point when selecting the image file is the administrator's home folder so you need to change to your own home folder to select the image file)
 * 9) Select the target device to write the image to (your device will be something like "/dev/mmcblk0" or "/dev/sdc")
 * 10) Click the "Write to device" button
 * 11) Wait for the process to finish and then insert the SD card in the Raspberry Pi

Using the Linux command line
Please note that the use of the "dd" tool can overwrite any partition of your machine. If you specify the wrong device in the instructions below you could delete your primary Linux partition. Please be careful.


 * 1) Download the zip file containing the image from a mirror or torrent
 * 2) * http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
 * 3) Verify if the the hash key of the zip file is the same as shown on the downloads page (optional). Assuming that you put the zip file in your home directory (~/), in the terminal run:
 * 4) * sha1sum ~/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.zip
 * 5) * This will print out a long hex number which should match the "SHA-1" line for the SD image you have downloaded
 * 6) Extract the image, with
 * 7) * unzip ~/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.zip
 * 8) Run df -h to see what devices are currently mounted
 * 9) If your computer has a slot for SD cards, insert the card. If not, insert the card into an SD card reader, then connect the reader to your computer.
 * 10) Run df -h again. The device that wasn't there last time is your SD card. The left column gives the device name of your SD card. It will be listed as something like "/dev/mmcblk0p1" or "/dev/sdd1". The last part ("p1" or "1" respectively) is the partition number, but you want to write to the whole SD card, not just one partition, so you need to remove that part from the name (getting for example "/dev/mmcblk0" or "/dev/sdd") as the device for the whole SD card. Note that the SD card can show up more than once in the output of df: in fact it will if you have previously written a Raspberry Pi image to this SD card, because the Raspberry Pi SD images have more than one partition.
 * 11) Now that you've noted what the device name is, you need to unmount it so that files can't be read or written to the SD card while you are copying over the SD image. So run the command below, replacing "/dev/sdd1" with whatever your SD card's device name is (including the partition number)
 * 12) * umount /dev/sdd1
 * 13) * If your SD card shows up more than once in the output of df due to having multiple partitions on the SD card, you should unmount all of these partitions.
 * 14) In the terminal write the image to the card with this command, making sure you replace the input file if= argument with the path to your .img file, and the "/dev/sdd" in the output file of= argument with the right device name (this is very important: you will lose all data on the hard drive on your computer if you get the wrong device name). Make sure the device name is the name of the whole SD card as described above, not just a partition of it (for example, sdd, not sdds1 or sddp1, or mmcblk0 not mmcblk0p1)
 * 15) * dd bs=4M if=~/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdd
 * 16) ** Please note that block size set to 4M will work most of the time, if not, please try 1M, although 1M will take considerably longer.
 * 17) * Note that if you are not logged in as root you will need to prefix this with sudo 
 * 18) * The dd command does not give any information of its progress and so may appear to have frozen. It could take more than five minutes to finish writing to the card. If your card reader has an LED it may blink during the write process. To forcibly stop the copy operation you can run pkill -USR1 -n -x dd in another terminal (prefixed with sudo if you are not logged in as root).
 * 19) Instead of dd you can use dcfldd; it will give a progress report about how much has been written.
 * 20) You can check what's written to the SD card by dd-ing from the card back to your harddisk to another image, and then running diff (or md5sum) on those two images. There should be no difference.
 * 21) As root run the command sync or if a normal user run sudo sync (this will ensure the write cache is flushed and that it is safe to unmount your SD card)
 * 22) Remove SD card from card reader, insert it in the Raspberry Pi, and have fun

Using any system and BerryBoot
If your Pi is connected to the Internet, you can use the BerryBoot installer to let it download and install the operating system. This requires that you first use a normal Windows/Mac/Linux computer to download a small .zip file with the Berryboot system files and extract it to an empty SD card. Then you put the SD card in your Pi, and follow the on-screen prompts to complete the installation. An additional advantage is that Berryboot allows you to install more than one operating system on a single SD card. Also, it is not necessary to install any additional software on your normal Windows/Mac/Linux computer.

= Other points =

To write your SD card you start by downloading the SD image (the data you will write to the card). The best way to do this is using BitTorrent. This generally results in a faster download as it is a highly distributed system (you will be downloading the data from users who have previously downloaded it).

= Manually resizing the SD card partitions (Optional) = The SD card image is sized for a 2 GB card. So, if you are using an SD card with a greater capacity, you may find that only 2 GB is available. If this is the case, then to gain more free space, the partitions must be resized. The Fedora Remix and the BerryBoot will automatically resize the partitions on the mounted card during the first boot. The Debian, OpenSuSe and Rasbian images won't, so you'll have to do it manually. The easiest way is to use the tool RPi raspi-config selecting menu item EXPAND-ROOTFS - Expand Root Partition to Fill SD Card. If you want to resize the SD card whilst the SD card is not mounted in the Pi, look here for instructions.

= Adding a data partition (Optional) = If you would rather not resize the partition on another machine as described above, either because you do not have another working Linux machine or you wish to keep your data on another partition to your operating system, you can instead create a new data partition and have that mount automatically at boot.

sudo su - apt-get install parted parted /dev/mmcblk0 unit chs print Model: SD SD08G (sd/mmc) Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 121279,3,31 Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 121280,4,32. Each cylinder is 65.5kB. Partition Table: msdos Number Start      End         Type     File system     Flags 1     16,0,0     1215,3,31   primary  fat32           lba 2     1232,0,0   26671,3,31  primary  ext4 3     26688,0,0  29743,3,31  primary  linux-swap(v1) mkpart primary 29744,0,0 121279,3,31 print Number Start      End          Type      File system     Flags 1     16,0,0     1215,3,31    primary   fat32           lba 2     1232,0,0   26671,3,31   primary   ext4 3     26688,0,0  29743,3,31   primary   linux-swap(v1) 4     29744,0,0  121279,3,31  primary quit mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p4 e2label /dev/mmcblk0p4 data vi /etc/fstab /dev/mmcblk0p4 /data           ext4    defaults        1       2 mkdir /data mount /data cd /data ls Your new partition has been created!
 * First you need to become root and install parted (I did all of this from the boot command prompt, although if you feel safer in a GUI, you can do all of this in a terminal window):
 * Then you need to run parted on your SD card, mine is /dev/mmcblk0, ymmv:
 * Once running, set the display units to something usable and then print your partition table
 * You should see something like this:
 * Now you need to create your data partition - you need to choose one more than the end of partition 3 with ,0,0 as your start and use the number from the line that starts with Disk as your end:
 * That should show your new partition:
 * Now quit and format the partition (again, ymmv with the specific device name, try ls /dev for some clues), and then label it:
 * Now we need to make sure that the partition is mounted automatically when the system boots (maybe don't use vi if you never have before, try nano):
 * Enter a line exactly like this at the end of the file and save and quit your text editor:
 * Create the mount point:
 * Now mount the partition:

=References=

SD(DC|DX] Card Class 6 & 10 Hints
[|SD card usage Hints with OverClocking]