This recipe will explain how to set up the SD card using a Windows operating system.
To prepare your image and the SD card on Windows, you will usually need the following software ingredients:
In the upcoming steps, we will unpack the archive containing the operating system image for the Banana Pi and write the image to the SD card:
.tgz
archive:.img
. If it is .tgz
or .tar.gz
file, you will need to unpack the archive twice. The following screenshot shows the final image file with the file extension .img
and the unpacked and compressed .tgz
archive:In the following steps, we are writing an Android image to the SD card using Windows:
PhoenixCard.exe
.The following screenshot shows the PhoenixCard application where the image has been successfully written:
Now you can insert the SD card into your Banana Pi and power it up. After the booting process, you will see the Android operating system.
The following steps explain how to write a Linux-based distribution to the SD card on Windows:
Once the burning process is done, you are ready to insert the freshly prepared SD card containing your Linux operating system into the Banana Pi and boot it up for the first time.
Some images are archived using Linux archive formats, which Windows may be unable to unpack natively. Therefore, it might be necessary to install a tool which is capable of unpacking the archive. In this recipe, we use 7-Zip to unpack the archives, which is open source software and is easy to use. Some images are also available as ZIP files, which can also be unpacked using 7-Zip or Windows Explorer. To extract the image from a ZIP file using the Windows Explorer, right-click on the ZIP file and select Extract all.
Linux archives usually have to be unpacked twice. Firstly, to uncompress the archive (.tar.gz
or .tgz
) and secondly, to unpack the actual tar archive (which is used to collect files into one uncompressed file). On Linux, you will be able to unpack the packed archives, and uncompress the compressed archives with one command.
After unpacking the image file and formatting your SD card, you need software to burn the image to the SD card. For Android, you will need the software PhoenixCard, for any other image based on Linux, the software Win32 Disk Imager is required.
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