Install Raspberry Pi Operating System on SD Card

Walk through the indepth tutorial for how to install Raspberry Pi operating system on SD card, within which two essential tools are introduced for a trouble-free Raspberry Pi OS installation on SD card.

Overview of Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. It comes with no operating system, you can opt to fill the Raspberry Pi with 100% customized OS, which is usually done by burning an operating system image file you've downloaded to an SD card.

Here's the Raspberry Pi operating system list:

• Raspbian
• NOOBS
• UBUNTU MATE
• SNAPPY UBUNTU CORE
• WINDOWS 10 IOT CORE
• OSMC
• LIBREELEC
• PINET
• RISC OS
• WEATHER STATION

Full Guide to Install Raspberry Pi OS on SD Card

This guide mainly focuses on how to accomplish the Raspberry Pi OS installation on a Windows PC. All you need is an SD card and a card reader. Follow the detailed guide below, to install OS on the SD card on your own.

How to Install Raspberry Pi Operating System on PC

Step 1. Download and install the latest version of the Raspberry Pi Imager.

Step 2. Insert your SD card into the computer with a card reader or an adapter.

Step 3. Open Raspberry Pi Imager and choose the required OS from the list presented.

Step 4. In the device box, select the correct SD card.

Step 4. Click "Write" and wait for the writing process to complete.

Step 5. Exit the imager and eject the SD card.

Another recommend Imager is Win32DiskImager, you can choose the one you like.

Download source: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Further Reading: Raspberry Pi SD Card Benchmark

Format SD Card to FAT16 or FAT32 for Raspberry Pi 1,2,3

Your SD card should be prepared in FAT files system, let it be either FAT16 or FAT32, not including large capacity SDHC or SDXC cards which with an exFAT file system. To set up a fully compatible SD card for Raspberry Pi, use the recommended free partition manager to format an SD card large than 32GB to FAT32 or convert exFAT to FAT32 on Windows 10, 8, 7, XP, or Vista.

Download EaseUS FREE partition manager and follow the guide below to format your SD card.

Step 1. Find your SD card and right-click the partition you want to format and choose "Format".

Step 2. Set a new partition label, file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4/exFAT), and cluster size to the selected partition, then click "OK".

Step 3. Click "Yes" on the pop-up window to continue.

Step 4. Click the "Execute 1 Task(s)" button on the toolbar, then click "Apply" to start formatting your SD card.