Preparing the SD Card & Installing Raspbian

Our first step is preparing the SD card we plan to use with our raspberry pi. Lets look at the steps to format and prepare the card in this first guide.

Getting Started

First we will need to setup the raspberry pi with all the needed software including raspbian (or similar).

Format the SD Card

Format your SD card using FAT32. I highly recommend not using a cheap card because it will break much sooner. I used a cheap SD card for about 3 months before losing all the data I didn’t back up.

Install Raspbian OS

Now install raspbian on your SD card. I am on a Mac so I will just use the terminal to burn the image file I downloaded from the raspberry pi official website.

Using the Terminal (Mac OS) to Write Image to SD Card

Taken from the raspberry pi website here are the following commands I used to write the raspbian image card to the SD card.

diskutil list
  • identify the disk (not partition) of your SD card. e.g. disk4 (not disk4s1)
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/[disk# from diskutil]
  • e.g. diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
sudo dd bs=1m if=[your image file].img of=/dev/[disk# from diskutil]
  • e.g. sudo dd bs=1m if=2014-09-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk4
Next Step >
Getting Started with a Raspberry Pi from Scratch
1 Preparing the SD Card 4:02
2 Booting Up & Configuring Raspbian 4:48
3 SSH and SSH Keys (Video Coming Soon)
4 Updating Python on Raspbian & Installing Useful Packages (Video Coming Soon)