Setting up your Raspberry Pi

Set up your SD card

If you have an SD card that doesn’t have the Raspbian operating system on it yet, or if you want to reset your Raspberry Pi, you can easily install Raspbian yourself. To do so, you need a computer that has an SD card port — most laptop and desktop computers have one.

The Raspbian operating system via NOOBS

Using the NOOBS software is the easiest way to install Raspbian on your SD card.

Download NOOBS

• Visit the Raspberry Pi downloads page.

• You should see a box linking to the NOOBS files. Click on the box.

• The simplest option is to download the zip archive of the files. Make sure to pay attention to where you save the archive, so that you can find it again quickly.

Format the SD card

Anything that’s stored on the SD card will be overwritten during formatting. So if the SD card on which you want to install Raspbian currently has any files on it, e.g. from an older version of Raspbian, you may wish to back these files up first to not lose them permanently.

• Visit the SD Association’s website and download SD Formatter for Windows or Mac.
  
• Follow the instructions to install the software.
  
• Insert your SD card into the computer or laptop’s SD card slot.
  
• In SD Formatter, select your SD card, and the format the card.
  

Extract NOOBS from the zip archive

Next, you will need to extract the files from the NOOBS zip archive you downloaded from the Raspberry Pi website.

• Find the downloaded archive — by default, it should be in your Downloads folder.
  
• Double-click on it to extract the files, and keep the resulting Explorer/Finder window open.
  

Copy the files

• Now open another Explorer/Finder window and navigate to the SD card. It’s best to position the two windows side by side.
  
• Select all the files in the NOOBS folder and drag them into the SD card window to copy them to the card.
  

• Once the files have all been copied over, you can eject the SD card.

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