Preparing an SD Card and Installing NOOBS and Raspbian OS on Raspberry Pi

Published by Joey Joe Joe Jr on November 8, 2018November 8, 2018

In this blog post, we’ll be preparing an SD card to install NOOBS and Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi’s operating system. NOOBS installs the Raspbian OS for us and provides some extra recovery functionality as well.

To prepare an SD card we must first delete all the volumes and partitions on the SD card. To do this open window explorer but pressing the Windows button + E, or by clicking on the folder icon. Right click on This PC and select Manage. Go to Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management. In the bottom section, each physical disk will be listed starting at Disk 0. Be careful in here, once you delete a volume on a disk all information will be lost forever. Find the SD card and on each volume right click and select delete volume until all volumes are deleted from your disk. Once all the volumes have been deleted your disk will have an unallocated black block available. Right-click on the unallocated space and select new simple volume. Agree to the default maximum volume size and drive letter and press Next. Next select File system FAT32, allocation unit size of 32K, give the volume a label, and uncheck the Perform a quick format checkbox. Press next, press finish.

My format didn’t start, please leave a comment if you know why. I right clicked on the volume and selected Mark Partition as Active. Then right click and select Format. Agree to the default maximum volume size and drive letter and press Next. Next select File system FAT32, allocation unit size of 32K, give the volume a label, and uncheck the Perform a quick format checkbox. Press next, press finish. The format can take some time.

While the disk is formatting go here to download NOOBS.

When the format is complete and the download is complete open the NOOBS zip folder, select all, right click, click through the Windows warning, copy, and paste the contents into the root of the SD card. When complete, right click on the SD card, select eject, and insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi.

Plug in a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and power supply. NOOBS will initialize. Select Raspbian and press Install.  NOOBS will stay resident on the SD card and can provide recovery options if needed. After the installation is complete press OK. The Raspberry Pi will reboot to the Rasbian desktop. From there you can follow the wizard to set your language and time zone, change your password from the default, get connected to a wifi network, and update your Raspberry Pi via the internet. We’ll go through these setting via the menus in the next blog post instead of using the wizard.