Manually Flash Raspberry Pi Image to SD Card

Take the hard easy route.

1. Download the OS from the Raspberry PI website.
2. Decompress the archive: unxz 2023-12-11-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img.xz (the name may differ slightly, depending on the creation date and which version you downloaded).
3. Insert a SD Card in to your computer and find the device path: lsblk -p.
   • Mine was was located at /dev/sdb. Replace /dev/sdb with your path in the following examples.
4. Make a backup of any data on the SD Card since we're going to be overwriting everything.
5. Remove the partition table on the SD Card:
   • dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=4096
6. Copy the downloaded .img file to the SD Card:
   • dd if=2023-12-11-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img of=/dev/sdb status=progress oflag=direct,sync

After all that, you should be good to go!

Helpful Links

• Restore your SD card from previous dd.
• Raspberry Pi documentation — actually contains the steps now, so this page is likely redundant. Oh well. They remove the official steps again, so I updated them here.

last updated: 2023-12-27