The Raspberry Pi is this small cool ARM based board that you can use for endless projects and is compatible with many GNU/Linux distributions!

It main storage is a simple SD card that goes into a slot in the board and in this card is where you must install the linux distro you choose to use.

Attention
In this article, to exemplify the installation of a distro, we will use the ARM compatible version of Arch Linux, being installed in a Ubuntu environment.

Writing the image

To write an image file to a SD card follow these steps:

  1. Download the the latest zip containing the image:
  2. Extract the zip file to your hard drive, giving you the image archlinux-hf-*.img.
  3. Open a terminal window and go the the directory where the image was extracted.
  4. Insert the card in your computer (at least 2GB1).
  5. Find out the path to the card:
    1. With the command df -h list all mounted partitions.
    2. Your card partition will be listed as something like /dev/mmcblk0p1.
    3. The sd card itself is the partition path minus the pX part, so something like /dev/mmcblk0, take note of it.
  6. Unmount the card with the command: 
    $ sudo umount /dev/mmcblk0
  7. To write the image to the card use: 
    $ sudo dd bs=1M if=archlinux-hf-*.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
  8. It could take a while, so relax.
  9. After is done run the command sync to ensure the cache is flushed and it safe to remove the card: 
    $ sudo sync
  10. Remove it, insert it in the Pi.
  11. Have fun!

Reading the image

After a while using your system you will have a fully personalized linux installation with your favorite programs in it.

But not everything are roses, SD cards are susceptible to corruption and a bad block can ruin your system, because of that is always handy to have a backup copy for easy recover!

And backing it up is pretty similar to how we write it in the first place:

  1. Insert the card with your system image in your computer.
  2. Like when writing your image, use the df -h command to find the path to the card.
  3. Unmount it with sudo umount /dev/path_to_card.
  4. Now, use the dd command to write an image of the card to a file: 
    $ sudo dd bs=1M if=/dev/path_to_card of=mylinux.image
  5. Execute the sync to flush the cache: 
    $ sudo sync
  6. Remove your card.

That’s it! Now you have a full backup of your customized system, if you have any problem just write it to a card line we did in the first part of this article and it will be as good as new!

Attention
The generated image can only be written to a card with the same (or larger) size, so the backup of a 4GB card can be written to a 8GB card, but not to a 2GB one.

  1. Each system have it’s own minimum space spec, make sure to check it in the systems site ↩