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Raspberry Pi: Beginners Guide

A Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board with a SoC unit and limited resources, besides  different types of software, some extra parts are needed in addition to the Raspberry Pi board in order to make the Raspberry Pi board work.

Basic Conventional Raspberry Pi System

Installation of Operating System Using Image Utility

Besides using the New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS) to install operating system of Raspberry Pi board on a SD card, an operating system can also be installed individually using an image utility to prepare a bootable SD card .

Installation of Operating System on a SD card Using Win32 Disk Imager:

1. Install or Save the Operating System package on SD card.

   1. Download the corresponding Operating System Image distribution from Raspberry Pi at  http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads. For example, The Raspbian "2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian.zip". 

   2. Unzip the downloaded zipped file and extract the image file, e.g. 2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian.img, to a temp folder, e.g. R:\Temporary. 

       

   3. Although the img file is a disk image file, the image cannot be dragged and dropped to the SD card directly as the NOOBS software package. Download the utility software to write the Operating System Image on the SD card from  http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ .

   4.  Unzip the downloaded zipped file and extract all files to a folder, e.g. R:\Temporary\win32diskimager-v0.9-binary. 

       

   5. No installation is needed for the Win32DiskImager utility. The "Win32DiskImager.exe" is already an executable. 

   6. Insert an SD card with capacity 4GB or greater into an SD card reader and check the assigned drive letter of the inserted SD card.

       

   7. Double click to run the "Win32DiskImager.exe" file. 

       

   8. Select the extracted image file, e.g. "2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian.img", for the Image File to be written onto the SD card.  

       

   9. Select the right drive, e.g. "F", for the Device to be written on.  

       

   10. Check again the entries for both "Image File" and "Device" because the Win32DiskImager utility will destroy the data on either the "Image File" or "Device" of the computer.

   11.  Click  "Write" to copy the data in "Image File" and then write the data to the "Device".

        

   12.  Click  "Yes" to confirm and proceed to write "Image File" to the "Device".

        

   13.  Click  "OK" to acknowledge the completion of the writing process.

        

   14.  Click  "Exit" to exit Win32 Disk Imager.

        

   15. Raspbian preparation completed. Only the partition that compatable with Windows are shown as following

         

   16. After the installation of the Raspbian, the SD card is resized  with an unallocated space in the middle.

       

   17. The partitions on the SD card are.