Flashing your SD card

To fully update your Pi’s software, or refresh it if you think it’s not working correctly, you can flash our SD card image onto the microSD card in your Pi.

To update the SD card, you’ll need to download our image, pi-image.img.xz. The flashing procedure is identical to flashing other Raspberry Pi images.

Etcher

We recommend using etcher, as it’s simple to use, and available on Windows, macOS and Linux. If you’re familiar with Raspberry Pi’s and have flashed images before with a different tool, that will also work.

Etcher example

If you choose to use a tool other than Etcher, you may need to extract the pi-image.img.xz to pi-image.img. There are many tools available for this, e.g. 7-zip.

Flashing

  1. Open Etcher and select the pi-image.img.xz file you downloaded
  2. Select your SD card from the devices window
  3. Click ‘Flash!’

The Raspberry Pi Foundation also have a good tutorial for all platforms on their website.