RPi Easy SD Card Setup

=SD Card setup= To boot the Raspberry Pi, you need an SD card installed with a bootloader provided by the foundation, and a suitable Operating System.

Official images are available from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.

Warning! When you write the Raspberry Pi image to your SD card you will lose all data that was on the card. =Safest/Laziest way= Buy a preloaded card from RS Components or element14 (not available yet)

=Easiest way=


 * Download and run the PiCard tool. It will guide you through the progress. See the google code repo and the forum discussion.The PiCard project has now been disbanded


 * Use an installer program. The Fedora ARM Installer will download and install Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix images, but it will also install other images if they are already downloaded and in uncompressed or .gz format.


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

=Easy way=

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).

This guide assumes you have downloaded the Debian "squeeze" image, with name debian6-17-02-2012. Obviously, if you are downloading a different or newer version, use the name of the version you have downloaded.

Copying the image to an SD Card on Windows

 * 1) Download the  image from a mirror or torrent
 * 2) * http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
 * 3) Extract the image file debian6-17-02-2012.img from the debian6-17-02-2012 directory in the debian6-17-02-2012.zip
 * 4) 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.
 * 5) Download the Win32DiskImager utility.  The download links are on the right hand side of the page, you want the binary zip.
 * 6) Extract the zip file and run the Win32DiskImager utility.
 * 7) Select the debian6-17-02-2012.img image file you extracted earlier
 * 8) 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 computer's hard disk!
 * 9) Click Write and wait for the write to complete.
 * 10) Exit the imager and eject the SD card.
 * 11) Insert the card in the Raspberry Pi, power it on, and it should boot up.  Have fun!

Copying an image to the SD Card in Mac OSx

 * 1) Download the  image from a mirror or torrent
 * 2) * http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
 * 3) Verify if the the hash key is the same (optional), in the terminal run:
 * 4) * shasum ~/Downloads/debian6-17-02-2012.zip
 * 5) Extract the image, just double click the zip, it will extract automatically
 * 6) From the terminal run df -h
 * 7) Connect the sdcard reader with the sdcard inside
 * 8) Run df -h again and look for the new device that wasn't listed last time.  Record the filesystem name of the device, e.g. /dev/disk1s1
 * 9) Open disk utility and unmount the partition of the sdcard (do not eject it, or you have to reconnect it)
 * 10) In the terminal write the image to the card with this command, making sure you replace "/dev/disk1" with the right device name from before, but missing out the final "s1".
 * 11) * dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/debian6-17-02-2012/debian6-17-02-2012.img of=/dev/disk1
 * 12) After the dd comand finishes go to disk utility and eject the sdcard
 * 13) Insert it in the raspberry pi, and have fun

Copying an image to the SD Card in Linux

 * 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) * shasum ~/debian6-17-02-2012.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 ~/debian6-17-02-2012.zip
 * 8) Run df to see what devices are currently mounted
 * 9) Connect the sdcard reader with the sdcard inside
 * 10) Run df 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/sdd1". The last digit ("1" here) is the partition number, but you want to write to the whole SD card, not just one partition, so you need to remove that digit from the name (getting for example "/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 RPi 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 can trash the hard drive on your computer if you get the wrong device name)
 * 15) * dd bs=1M if=~/debian6-17-02-2012/debian6-17-02-2012.img of=/dev/sdd
 * 16) * Note that if you are not logged in as root you will need to prefix this with sudo 
 * 17) Remove SD card from card reader, insert it in the Raspberry Pi, and have fun

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

After extracting the image file from the downloaded zip file (right click the zip file and select "Extract here"):


 * 1) Insert the SD card into your computer or connect the SD card reader with the SD card inside
 * 2) Install the ImageWriter tool from the Ubuntu Software Center
 * 3) Launch the ImageWriter tool (it needs your administrative password)
 * 4) Select the image file (debian6-17-02-2012.img) to be written to the SD card
 * 5) Select the target device to write the image to (your device will be something like "/dev/sdc")
 * 6) Click the "Write do device button"
 * 7) Wait for the process to finish and then insert the SD card in the Raspberry Pi