How to prepare SD card for RASPBIAN JESSIE from Mac OS X

12/28/2015

I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi 2. I needed to put the OS on the SD card I had gotten. I don’t want to forget how I did this, so I’m writing it down.

  1. Download the OS image from Raspberry Pi site.
  2. Open terminal and go to the file and run: openssl sha1 /path/to/file.zip
  3. Make sure the sha1 matches whats on the download site to confirm file isn’t corrupted.
  4. Open Disk Utility on your Mac and format your SD card, I used FAT32
  5. In terminal, find your SD card by running: diskutil list
  6. Once you know what disk is your SD card unmount all partitions with: sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1 (Repeat as needed for all partitions)
  7. Unzip the Raspbian file by double clicking it, it should unzip a .img file.
  8. Last, copy the image to the SD card by running: sudo dd bs=1m if=/path/of/img/file.img of=/dev/desk2 (Whatever disk it is. There is no progress bar so depending on your hardware this can take some time. Be patient.)