how to make a flash drive bootable for raspberry pi on mac

You run the checksum program on the file you download – i.e. So this is a way to ensure that you have the “clean and correct” official file. The checksum changes if the file is altered in any way. In the event that one of these “went rogue” and started putting viruses or other malware into the files hosted on their site, the file’s checksum would be different.

Because of the sheer volume of download traffic, it’s necessary to use many “mirror” sites to host the downloads.

In case you don’t know what this is all about, it’s a way of testing that the file you have downloaded has not been tampered with. So once you’ve downloaded the OS image file, you might want to follow the instructions on the download page to check the checksum. If you happen to want the, now superseded, Wheezy Beta version it’s here In Firefox, I had to choose “Save File” and click OK Scroll down until you find Raspbian Wheezy (current at Oct 2012)… The latest version of Debian for the Raspberry Pi at the time of writing is Raspbian Wheezy.Ī List of all official images available is found on the Raspberry Pi download page which currently looks something like this.

a downloaded image of the Operating System you want to put on the card.

There have already been three versions of Debian since I got my first Pi in May 2012 (Squeeze, Wheezy Beta and Wheezy Raspbian). Unless you know how to make a bootable SD card from the downloaded OS image file, you won’t be able to take advantage of the improvements (and believe me, there will be lots of them as time progresses). Why do I need to know how to write a raspberry pi disk image to SD card with win32diskimager?Įven if you bought a ready-prepared SD card with your Raspberry Pi, sooner or later a newer, better version of the operating system (OS) will be released.

How to make a flash drive bootable for raspberry pi on mac