Operation Manual

Figure 1-5: Flashing the SD card using the dd command in Linux
Flashing from OS X
If your current PC is a Mac running Apple OS X, you’ll be pleased to hear that things are 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/diskX,
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/diskX 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/diskX 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, it 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://launchpad.net/win32-
image-writer. Follow these steps to download, install and use the Image Writer for Windows software to prepare the SD
card for the Pi:
1. Download the binary (not source) 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.
4. Browse to the imagefilename.img file you extracted from the distribution archive, replacing imagefilename.img with the
actual name of the file extracted from the Zip archive, and then click the Open button.
5. Select the drive letter corresponding to the SD card from the Device drop-down dialogue box. If you’re unsure which