Raspberry Pi T3 Alliance Customized SD Card Image
Having the ability to re-write the SD card of the Raspberry Pi is very handy if something goes wrong and you cannot easily find a way to fix it. Using this download along with a way to write to the SD card you can start completely fresh with your Raspberry Pi computer. – Keep in mind that any custom programs/data on the SD card will be lost.
First method to create fresh SD card using Windows or OSX Computer:
Materials/Software you will need:
- SD card Reader/Writer (if your laptop does not include one) to write the image, every T3 Alliance RPi student kit comes with one – if you do not have one this model also works: Trascend USB 3.0 Reader / Writer TS-RDF5K.
- Micro SD Card to write image to – you may re-write existing cards over and over, but if you want to have spares on hand, we recommend this Sandisk 16GB card SDSQUAR-016G-GN6MA.
- Latest T3 Raspberry Pi SD Card Image – RPi4B or RPi3B+: t3a-raspbian-2020-02-5.zip
- The free software Etcher from etcher.io it works with any Windows, macOS, or Linux computer – But cannot run on the Raspberry Pi itself.
Steps:
- Connect the SD card reader with the SD card to your laptop
- Open Balena Etcher software
- Select the zip file you downloaded as the source for Etcher – do not extract the zip file = Etcher takes the zip file directly as an input.
- Select the destination for the image (should be 16GB or 32GB SD card)
- Press the “Flash” button
- Success!
Second Method to Duplicate SD Card using your Raspberry Pi directly:
If you would like to duplicate the current SD card in a working raspberry pi the built in tool called “SD Card Copier” is an easy way to do it.
Usually your internal SD card will be called something like /dev/mmcblk0 and the exernal will be dev/sda or dev/sdb.
So in this example the the source was “/dev/mmcblk0” and the destination “/dev/sda”.
If you are trying to write to and overwrite an already used raspberry pi SD card you may not be able to see it in the drop down menu and will have to first erase the start block of that SD card. Open a terminal and enter:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1
— ONLY APPLICABLE FOR LEGACY 7″ SCREEN MODELS —
If you are using the older 7″ screen model you have to modify /boot/config.txt file after you have flashed the SD card – on windows 10 you can mount the boot partition as it is FAT I believe, and use notepad++ or other text editor to add in the resolution settings to the config file.
Resolution | config file |
---|---|
1024×600 | hdmi_group=2 hdmi_mode=87 hdmi_cvt 1024 600 60 3 0 0 0 hdmi_force_hotplug=1 |
This is not necessary if you are using the newer 10″ screen model.
OLD versions of the images (should not be needed any longer):
- Old Image – RPi3B+: t3a-raspbian-2018-12-21.zip
- Old Image – RPi3B+: t3a-raspbian-2018-04-18.zip