Murky Swamp

Install Raspbian image on Raspberry Pi 3

Jun 26, 2016
1 minute read

For SBC, a.k.a Single Board Computer, dd is our friend. Normally, this is the only tool we use to “install” OS.

Today I will take “Raspbian” for an instance. As you can see, Raspbian is debian for Raspberry Pi, and its latest version May 2016, released in 2016-05-27. Download link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

After unzipping it, we get a file named 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie-lite.img.

OK, let’s get started.

  1. Prepare MicroSD

    My work environment is Mac OS X, so I just open Disk Utility, click on “Eject” button of my disk. Also, check device name on the right , which is some name like disk2 or disk3. Mine here is disk3.

  2. Run dd

    Open terminal, run below command:

     sudo dd bs=1m if=/path/to/your/2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/rdisk<N>

    Here, we must pay attention to /dev/rdisk<N>. If you get disk2 above, use rdisk2 here, and if you get disk3, use rdisk3.

  3. Finish

    After a while, dd puts the whole image into our MicroSD card, bad thing is there’s no output of dd, so we never know when it is done. Once it’s finished, all we need to do is to eject our card, and put it into Raspberry Pi and power on.