How to flash img on Mac for Raspberry Pi

What's the best way to copy a Linux disk image on to an SD card to use in a Raspberry Pi

I tried Disk Utility but it did not allow for FAT32.


  1. Download the latest Linux OS from Raspberry Pi’s Downloads Page.
  2. Use Etcher to write the OS image to your SD card.

You can use dd to write disk images to disks.

  1. Download a Raspberry Pi image either from the Raspberry Pi download page or from a third party website.
  2. Once the download is finished, open Spotlight (Command+Space), search for Terminal and open it.
  3. In the terminal, type diskutil list. From the list, find your SD card from its size, partition names etc. and note down its disk number (for example, disk4).
  4. Issue the command diskutil umountDisk diskX where X is the disk number.
  5. Do not press Enter until I say so! Type sudo dd if= in your terminal, drag and drop the image file to your terminal, continue typing with of=/dev/diskX bs=1m where X is the disk number. At the end, the command should look like sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded/disk.img of=/dev/diskX bs=1m. Press Enter and execute the command. It will ask for your password. Type your password, and press enter. While you type, no letters or dots will appear, but type anyway, and press Enter.
  6. It may take several minutes for the command to complete, so give it some time. Once it is done, it will show some text and go back to bash. After that, you can take your SD card and it should boot in your Raspberry Pi.