Raspberry Pi is a single-board small-size computer that does not need too much power to be able to run. These devices are cheap and can be customized by the user. All of these devices run on the Raspberry Pi operating system. In fact, the storage device on these systems is actually an SD card or a microSD card. This SD card contains everything you would need to run Raspberry Pi properly.
In order to be able to use a Raspberry Pi device properly, you need to install the operating system on this SD card. We can use a special software called Raspberry Pi Imager for installing the Raspberry Pi operating system on any SD card. In the similar manner, we can also upgrade to a newer version of the operating system.
Raspberry Pi Imager is available for Windows, Ubuntu Linux and macOS. It does not have any special requirements and can download the operating system files from the internet. It is the official tool provided by the Raspberry Pi website.
When we launch Raspberry Pi Imager, we have to choose two things – operating system to be installed and the target memory card. From the list of the operating systems, we can choose the latest Raspberry Pi OS (official), Raspberry Pi OS based images, general purpose OS, Kodi media player, emulation, utility images and more. For installing Raspberry Pi OS, we have to choose the first entry in the list.
Next we have to choose the target memory card after clicking on “Choose Storage”. This will show a list of all the available memory card devices. If your SD card is not available in this list, then first insert the SD card in your PC’s SD card slot (or memory card reader), and then relaunch Raspberry Pi Imager. Now it should be able to find your SD card.
As we click on the “Write” button, the program reads your memory card and formats it. After this, it downloads and loads the Raspberry Pi OS image on the SD card. We can now use this prepared SD card on any supported Raspberry Pi board.
You can download Raspberry Pi Imager from https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/.