Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Booting a Raspberry Pi B+ with the Raspbian Debian Wheezy image

It took me a while to boot my brand new Raspberry Pi B+ with a usable Linux image. I chose the Raspbian Debian Wheezy image available on the downloads page of the official raspberrypi.org site. Here are the steps I needed:

1) Bought micro SD card. Note DO NOT get a regular SD card for the B+ because it will not fit in the SD card slot. You need a micro SD card.

2) Inserted the SD card via an SD USB adaptor in my MacBook Pro.

3) Went to the command line and ran df to see which volume the SD card was mounted as. In my case, it was /dev/disk1s1.

4) Unmounted the SD card. I initially tried 'sudo umount /dev/disk1s1' but the system told me to use 'diskutil unmount', so the command that worked for me was:

diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s1

5) Used dd to copy the Raspbian Debian Wheezy image (which I previously downloaded) per these instructions. Important note: the target of the dd command is /dev/disk1 and NOT /dev/disk1s1. I tried initially with the latter, and the Raspberry Pi wouldn't boot (one of the symptoms that something was wrong other than the fact that nothing appeared on the monitor, was that the green light was solid and not flashing; a google search revealed that one possible cause for that was a problem with the SD card). The dd command I used was:

dd if=2014-06-20-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

6) At this point, I inserted the micro SD card into the SD slot on the Raspberry Pi, then connected the Pi to a USB power cable, a monitor via an HDMI cable, a USB keyboard and a USB mouse. I was able to boot and change the password for the pi user. The sky is the limit next ;-)




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