Operation Manual

Imaging from OS X
Imaging the Pi’s SD card on OS X is almost exactly the same as flashing the SD card was back in Chapter 1. Again, make sure
you have enough hard disk space to hold a file the size of the SD card. Then follow these steps:
1. Select Utilities from the Application menu, and then click on the Terminal application.
2. Plug your Pi’s smaller SD card into a card reader connected to the PC.
3. Type diskutil list to see a list of storage devices. Find the SD card by its size, and note the device address
(/dev/diskX, where X is a letter corresponding to the device).
4. If the SD card has been automatically mounted and appears on the desktop, type diskutil unmountdisk
/dev/diskX to unmount it before proceeding.
5. Type dd of=temporaryimage.img if=/dev/diskX bs=2M to read the contents of the SD card and write it to a file
called temporaryimage.img.
Imaging from Windows
The Windows Image Writer tool that you used to flash the SD card in Chapter 1, “Meet the Raspberry Pi”, doesn’t support the
creation of images. Instead, you’ll need to use the Parted Magic disc to gain access to the Linux dd utility, as follows:
1. Insert the Parted Magic CD into your PC, reboot and choose Standard Settings.
2. Open a terminal window using the third icon from the left on the bottom tool bar, which looks like a computer monitor (see
Figure 5-10).
3. Type fdisk -l to get a list of drives on your PC, and find your main hard drive by size. Note the device name:
/dev/sdXN, where X is the drive letter and N the partition number. For some computers with in-built SD card readers, this
may appear as /dev/mmcblkX where X is a letter corresponding to the device. If so, use that address in the following
instructions.
4. Create a mount point for your PC’s hard drive by typing mkdir /media/harddrive, and then mount the drive with
mount /dev/sdXN /media/harddrive -o=rw to gain access.
5. Insert your SD card reader with the Pi’s smaller SD card into the PC, and then use fdisk -l to find its device node
(/dev/sdY where Y is the drive letter).
6. Type dd of=/media/harddrive/temporaryimage.img if=/dev/sdY bs=2M to read the contents of the SD card
and write it to a file called temporaryimage.img on your hard drive.
Figure 5-10: The terminal icon in Parted Magic