User ID: mio
Subject: Manually Flash Raspberry Pi Image to SD Card

The Raspberry Pi documentation used to outline the method for flashing the OS image on to an SD Card using the dd command line utility. They have since removed this information and replaced it with an increased number of steps on using the "Rasperry Pi Imager".

  1. Download the OS from the Raspberry Pi website.
  2. Decompress the archive: (The name of the archive may be different depending on version) 
    unxz 2024-03-15-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img.xz
  3. Insert an SD Card in to your computer and find it's device path with: 
    lsblk -p
    • Mine was located at /dev/sdb, replace that with your path below examples.
  4. Make a backup of any data on your SD Card if needed since everything will be overwritten.
  5. Remove the partition table on the SD Card: 
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=4096
  6. Copy the downloaded image file to the SD Card: 
    dd if=2024-03-15-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img of=/dev/sdb status=progress oflag=direct,sync

After all of that, you should be good to go!