Appendix A Installing NOOBS to a microSD Card 213THE OFFICIAL RASPBERRY PI BEGINNER’S GUIDE
The NOOBS download is quite large, and can take a while to download on a slower internet
connection. When the download has finished, plug your microSD card into your PC. It should
show up as a single removable drive; if it doesn’t, it may need to be formatted first.
Formatting the microSD
To format a previously used microSD card ready for NOOBS, Windows, and macOS users
should download the SD Card Association SD Memory Card Formatter tool from rpf.io/sdcard,
then double-click to install it; Linux users should use their distribution’s disk management tool
to delete any existing partitions on the disk, create a single partition, and format it as VFAT,
then move onto the next section of this guide.
TWO OPTIONS
You may have noticed that there are two NOOBS download options:
NOOBS and NOOBS Lite. NOOBS downloads both NOOBS and a copy
of the latest Raspbian in a single bundle; NOOBS Lite downloads just
NOOBS itself. Most users will want NOOBS; only download NOOBS Lite if
you’re planning to install an operating system other than Raspbian. Both
versions install in the same way, as described in this appendix.