Contents - Raspberry PI Community Projects

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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
BitTorrent_(protocol)) . 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
debian6-13-04-2012. 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. The remainder of this assumes you
are using the Raspbian “wheezy” download 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.zip
▪ http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
2. Extract the image file 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.img from the downloaded
.zip file.
3. 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. If the card is not new, you should format it;
otherwise Win32DiskImager may hang.
4. Download the Win32DiskImager (https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer)
utility. The download links are on the right hand side of the page, you want the
binary zip.
5. Extract the executable from the zip file and run the Win32DiskImager utility.
You may need to run the utility as Administrator.
6. Select the 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.img image file you extracted earlier
7. 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!
8. Click Write and wait for the write to complete.
9. Exit the imager and eject the SD card.
10. Insert the card in the Raspberry Pi, power it on, and it should boot up. There is an
option in the configure script that comes up to expand the partitions to use all of
the SD card if you have used one larger than 4 GB
In Windows the SD card will appear only to have a fairly small size - about 75 Mbytes.
This is because most of the card has a partition that is formatted for the Linux operating
system that the RPi uses and is not visible in Windows.