RaspberryPi Boot Card Creation

This manual describes how to prepare and create a bootable SD Card from the downloadable IACBOX RaspberryPi Installer on both Windows and Linux based operating systems.

Partitioning using Disk Management for Windows #

To prepare the Boot Card with Microsoft Windows operating system it is recommended to use the Disk Management, which is already included in Windows 10 system by default. Start the Disk Management with right-click on the Start Menu, and then choose Disk Management to see the below window open.

Scroll to the lower section of the window and find Disk with type Removable under disk name.

Delete all existing partitions on the SD Card by right-clicking on each of all allocated partitions and then choosing Delete Partition so it becomes s single Unallocated partition.

Right-click on the disk partition, then click on New Simple Volume and Simple Volume Wizard pop-up will open, click Next on it, and this will be displayed.

Click Next, and Assign Drive Letter or Path window will be displayed

Click on the Assign the following drive letter and click Next.

Then Format Partition option like below will be displayed

Choose Do not format this volume and click Next. A confirmation will be displayed, click Finish and get back to the Disk Management window.

Now right-click on the Partition, and click on Shrink Volume... to open a new dialog where the partition size can be specified.

Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB according to the SD Card size, so the Total size after shrink in MB will be around 2000 and click Shrink. Confirm with Yes on the confirmation popup.

The Disk Management will be displayed again with the SD Card being partitioned into two partitions, one with RAW type and the other one will still say Unallocated.

Right-click on the RAW partition and click Format to open a new dialog .

Enter the Label and choose File system as FAT32 then click OK.

Clicking OK on Format confirmation popup will finish the partition steps.

Partitioning using Linux CLI #

If you are using a Linux based operating system we recommend using the fdisk command-line utility. Because this command needs root privilege, we must use sudo at the beginning of the command. After inserting the SD Card into your Linux machine, carefully follow the below steps.

Issue the command below to enter fdisk utility.

sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblkX

After entering fdisk Command you can enter this sequence in order. Only the p (Print Partition) command is optional and can be skipped.

# short commands to type
p
d
n
p
1
2048
+2G
t
c
p
w

The d command is meant to delete all existing partitions on the SD card and can be repeated as needed.

After those steps, format the partition using the below command. This is the last step for partitioning the SD Card on Linux.

sudo mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/mmcblkXp1 -n IACBOX

Next, mount the disk to some mount-point.

mount /dev/mmcblkXp1 mount-point

Extract downloaded installer #

Extract files from downloaded IACBOX archive to drive (Windows), or mount point (Linux).