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Installing Rasbian

Having run numerous experiments on my Rasberry Pi I am ready to install the final version of my weather software and put it into production, but before I start I needed to clean everything up and do a clean install of Rasbian.

There are excellent instructions for this on the Rasbian Web Site

The instructions below are the manual way to do it, which is what I prefer to do.

First get the most recent copy of Rasbain, this can be found here

On linux you can use wget, but on a mac you have to use curl

NOTE: You must use the -L switch, which tells curl to follow the link to the lastest copy,and the -o switch to direct the output to a file

iMac:~ Mike$ curl -L https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_full_latest -o raspbian_full_latest.zip
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   298  100   298    0     0    908      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--   911
 35 2530M   35  902M    0     0  5654k      0  0:07:38  0:02:43  0:04:55 6765k

Before you can use the file, you have to unzip it

iMac:~ Mike$ unzip raspbian_full_latest.zip
Archive:  raspbian_full_latest.zip
  inflating: 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-full.img
iMac:~ Mike$ ls -al
total 19486304
drwxr-xr-x   6 Mike  admin     204 22 Mar 09:48 .
drwxr-xr-x  19 Mike  admin     646 21 Mar 15:54 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 Mike  admin  7323254784 13 Feb 16:31 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-full.img
-rw-r--r--   1 Mike  admin  2653723839 22 Mar 09:16 raspbian_full_latest.zip

Now you can use this image to format your SD card

Plug you SD card into you computer and use diskutil to get the disk information

On my system the SD card is disk5

iMac:~ Mike$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:             TYPE NAME          SIZE     IDENTIFIER
   0:    GUID_partition_scheme            *4.0 TB   disk0
   1:            EFI EFI           209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:      Apple_CoreStorage MacintoshHD       4.0 TB   disk0s2
   3:         Apple_Boot Recovery HD       650.0 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:             TYPE NAME          SIZE     IDENTIFIER
   0:    GUID_partition_scheme            *121.3 GB   disk1
   1:            EFI EFI           209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:      Apple_CoreStorage MacintoshHD       121.0 GB   disk1s2
   3:         Apple_Boot Boot OS X         134.2 MB   disk1s3

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *6.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI ⁨EFI⁩                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS ⁨TimeMachine⁩             6.0 TB     disk2s2

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *32.0 GB    disk3
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 ⁨boot⁩                    268.4 MB   disk3s1
   2:                      Linux ⁨⁩                        31.7 GB    disk3s2

Now that we know which disk to format, first unmount it.

iMac:~ Mike$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3
Unmount of all volumes on disk5 was successful

The copy the new image onto the raw device which corrosponds to the SD Card.

You can check progress with the <ctl>+t command

iMac:~ Mike$ sudo dd bs=1m if=2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-full.img of=/dev/rdisk3 conv=sync
Password:
load: 1.63  cmd: dd 48060 uninterruptible 0.02u 0.33s
603+0 records in
602+0 records out
631242752 bytes transferred in 16.161957 secs (39057322 bytes/sec)
6984+0 records in
6984+0 records out
7323254784 bytes transferred in 187.739254 secs (39007584 bytes/sec)

Once the copy has finished you can eject the SD card.

It is now ready for use in your Rasberry Pi

Mike Revitt - Cloud Computing Specialist

Rasberry Pi Guides >>>

Installing Rasbian

First get the most recent copy of Rasbain, this can be found here

Now you can use this image to format your SD card