- #INSTALL RASPBIAN ON SD CARD MAC UTILITY INSTALL#
- #INSTALL RASPBIAN ON SD CARD MAC UTILITY DOWNLOAD#
- #INSTALL RASPBIAN ON SD CARD MAC UTILITY MAC#
Then press p and enter to see the partitions. This isn’t essential, but if you have the extra space on a USB Flash Drive, why not use it all?įrom your Raspberry Pi, type the following command to start FDisk: sudo fdisk /dev/sda Step 5 – Expand the Raspbian partition on your USB Flash drive to fill itįinally, we’re just going to do a little housekeeping to utilise all the available space on your USB Flash drive as the method using raspi-config doesn’t work on USB Flash drives. If all goes well, it should boot from your USB Flash Drive which you’ll find substantially quicker than your SD Card. Now unmount both your USB Flash Drive and your SD card and pop them both into your Raspberry Pi and switch it on. We’re almost done! Step 4 – Boot from your USB Flash Drive on your Raspberry Pi Save the cmdline.txt file and close the Finder window. This will instruct your Raspberry Pi to boot from the USB Flash Drive instead of from the SD card. Open up the file called cmdline.txt in TextEdit or similar and amend the line which reads: root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 Open a new Finder window and go to your SD card. Once you’ve completed step 3, you need to change the default boot path to tell the Raspberry Pi to boot from your USB drive. Step 4 – Change the boot path on your SD card We’re almost done at this point, only one more step to go. This copies the all-important files and instructions to tell your Raspberry Pi to boot from the USB Flash Drive. Open up the USB Flash Drive volume and copy all the files from that onto your SD card. Once you’ve done this, you’ll notice on your Desktop, there are two mounted volumes one is your USB Flash Drive, the other is your SD Card. It’s dead easy, choose your SD Card from the devices listed on the right, then click on ‘Erase’, choose FAT32 in the Formats list and click on ‘Erase’. Using Disk Utility, format your SD Card using FAT32. The next step is to configure your SD Card to give the correct boot instruction to start the OS from the USB Flash Drive Step 3 – Configure your SD card Go stick the kettle on and have a brew!Įventually, you will see something similar to the above, and it probably took a while too. This takes anything from 5 to 20 mins depending on the speed of your USB Flash Drive. The blocks will now begin moving to your USB Flash Drive from the Raspbian OS image. Now run this command to begin the copy: sudo dd bs=1m if=-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk2Īs with before, make sure you change disk2 to whatever your computer identifies as being the USB Flash Drive, and change -wheezy-raspbian.img to whatever your image file is called. If you’ve downloaded and unzipped the disk image to your downloads folder, running this command should take you there: cd ~/Downloads/ For ease, I’ve changed the directory in Terminal to where the Raspbian image is located, which in this case is my downloads folder. “Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful”. Yet again, be really careful to change disk2 to whatever your computer identifies the USB Flash Drive as. To do this enter the following command: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 Next we’re going to unmount the USB Flash Drive. Yours may be different so change to suit your configuration. In the screen shot above, I can see that /dev/disk2 is the correct identifier for my Sandisk USB Flash Drive. Important – make a note of the correct identifier, you can do some serious damage by choosing the wrong one! The list of attached disks will show up with their identifiers. To do this run the following command: diskutil list The first thing we’re going to do is get the device identifier for your USB Flash drive. Plug in your USB stick and launch Terminal.
#INSTALL RASPBIAN ON SD CARD MAC UTILITY INSTALL#
Step 2 – Install the Raspbian OS to your USB Flash drive It’s around 400mb in size, so should only take a couple of minutes over a broadband connection.
#INSTALL RASPBIAN ON SD CARD MAC UTILITY DOWNLOAD#
You will need the standard Raspbian OS image, you can download this from the official Raspberry Pi website. Step 1 – Download Raspbian from Raspberry Pi You will still need an SD card to store the boot instructions to tell the Raspberry Pi to launch the OS from the USB the Raspberry Pi’s can’t (yet) boot directly from a USB storage device.
#INSTALL RASPBIAN ON SD CARD MAC UTILITY MAC#
I’m going to assume that you know your way around Terminal, and are using a Mac to perform these steps. This site is run off a 16GB Corsair Voyager 3 USB Flash drive. I’ve tested several USB Flash drives, and found Sandisk and Corsair to be the best for speed and reliability. USB Flash drives provide a cheap and reliable alternative. SD Cards have a limited read/write cycle, and when hosting a site with a MySQL database from a SD card, it won’t take long before you start getting corruptions and failures. Running from a USB connected Flash or Hard Drive has many advantages, the biggest being speed and reliability. In this tutorial, I’m going to talk you through running Raspbian from a USB connected drive instead of from an SD card.