Preconfigured SD card

 Copying the image to SD card

The easy wasy for Cardiff based people (University or NHS) is just to drop an SD card into us and we will make a copy of one of our images and send you away ready to “plug and play”.

The other option unfortunately requires a bit of work to take the disk image you can download and get this copied and get it installed on to your SD card (with a minimum of 8Gb capacity).

  • Download image
  • Install onto SD card using software which can create the correct UNIX partitions and configure the card to be bootable by your Raspberry Pi.
  • Booting the Raspberry Pi and expanding your partition to make use of all of the space on your card.

Download Image

Install onto SD card

For windows user, you should use the Win32DiskImager program to:

  1. Extract the image file from the downloaded .zip file, so you now have “distribution-name.img”.
  2. Insert the SD card into your SD card reader and check what drive letter it was assigned. You can easily see the drive letter (for example G:) by looking in the left column of Windows Explorer. You can use the SD Card slot (if you have one) or a cheap Adapter in a USB slot.
  3. Download the Win32DiskImager utility (it is also a zip file). You can run this from a USB drive.
  4. Extract the executable from the zip file and run the Win32DiskImager utility; you may need to run the utility as Administrator! Right-click on the file, and select ‘Run as Administrator’
  5. Select the image file you extracted above.
  6. Select the drive letter of the SD card in the device box. Be careful to select the correct drive; if you get the wrong one you can destroy your data on the computer’s hard disk! If you are using an SD Card slot in your computer (if you have one) and can’t see the drive in the Win32DiskImager window, try using a cheap Adapter in a USB slot.
  7. Click Write and wait for the write to complete.
  8. Exit the imager and eject the SD card.
  9.  You are now ready to plug the card into your Raspberry Pi.

Expand the partition

Once your raspberry pi has booted up:

  1. Type ‘sudo raspi-config expand_rootfs‘ and press enter.