Format SD card for use with Raspberry Pi

Owning a brand new Raspberry Pi means you'll have a 100% new installation of your favorite operating system. Whether it's a recommended Raspbian or an IoT platform like Windows 10 IoT Core, you'll need to prepare an SD card to use with your Raspberry Pi before booting.

First, you'll need an SD card that's big enough for the operating system - usually 8GB or larger. Here's how you can format an SD card for the Raspberry Pi.

Use Etcher to format and flash SD cards

The simplest option is to use balenaEtcher to flash and format the SD card. It will flash the operating system's ISO files, creating the exact partition table on the same SD card. balenaEtcher is available for macOS, Linux and Windows.

1. First, download and install balenaEtcher. You also need to have the selected ISO file ready. You can download Raspbian from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

2. Open balenaEtcher after installation. First, select the operating system ISO by clicking 'SelectImage' , then the ISO file.

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3. Click 'Select Target' and select SD card.

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4. Click Flash and wait for balenaEtcher to finish creating the partition, copying files and flashing.

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The existing partition table of SD card is also completely erased. Whether new or old, if you want to install the operating system on a Raspberry Pi easily, balenaEtcher is the best method.

Use dd to format and flash SD card

If you're running Linux or macOS, you can also flash your operating system from the terminal using dd.

To get started, confirm that the SD card is detected. Open a terminal and on macOS, enter diskutil list and locate SD card (for example, disk4 ). On Linux, enter lsblk and find the SD card (e.g. / dev / sdb ), as well as all current partitions on that drive (e.g. / dev / sdb1, / dev / sdb2 , etc.) .

Disconnect the device. On macOS, type:

 diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX 

Replace 'X' with the drive number, located with diskutil. On Linux, enter:

 sudo umount /dev/sdbX 

Replace sdb with SD card and X with partition number.

Take action for every partition on that drive (for example: '/ dev / sdb1,' '/ dev / sdb2.', Etc.).

If you have an ISO file, you first need to create the IMG file. You can use dd to do this. On macOS, type:

 hdiutil convert iso-file.iso -format UDRW -o img-file.img 

On Linux, enter:

 sudo dd if=iso-file.iso of=img-file.img 

Wait for the process to complete before continuing.

Copy the contents of the IMG file with dd. For macOS, enter:

 sudo dd bs=1m if=iso.img of=/dev/rdiskX conv=sync 

Replace 'rdiskX' with the number of disks you have found with diskutil (and remember to use rdisk instead of the disk here). For Linux, enter:

 sudo dd bs=1m if=iso.img of=/dev/sdX conv=fsync 

Replace sdX with the letter that represents the SD card (e.g. sdb ).

Once completed, disconnect the drives using the instructions above and the SD card will be ready for use.

Format SD card manually on Windows and macOS

Another approach is to manually format the SD card and use a simple installer like NOOBS to directly install the operating system. You can do that by using the SD Memory Card Formatter tool on Windows and macOS.

1. Download and install SD Memory Card Formatter for your specific operating system, then open it.

2. Select SD card and click 'Format', Click mode 'Yes' to confirm.

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3. After completing the steps, you will receive a notice of completion. Click OK to exit.

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You can then copy the contents of the NOOBS zip archive to the FAT32 formatted card. Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and power it, then follow the on-screen instructions to install the operating system.

Format SD card manually on Linux

The best approach to manually formatting on Linux (to use the NOOBs installer) is to use GParted to create partitions.

1. Download and install GParted, then open it after installation. From the drop-down menu in the right corner, select SD card.

2. If you have more than one partition, select them one by one, then click the 'Delete' button, then select 'Apply'. Click 'New' and select FAT32 as your file system, click the 'Add' button , then select 'Apply' and confirm the changes.

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3. If not, right click, go to 'Format to' and select FAT32, then click 'Apply'.

Now the card will be formatted as FAT32, ready for you to transfer NOOBS files there manually.

Prepare Pi

Once the SD card has been formatted and flashed, you can switch to setting up the Raspberry Pi. You can then use it as a hub for all types of projects, from retro game consoles to home automation servers.

What do you plan to use the Raspberry Pi for? Let everyone know the project ideas in the comments below!

Hope you are succesful.