/piflash

Write ("flash") a Raspberry Pi boot image to an SD card, with features for power users (auto-unwrap archive files) or newbies (safety checks to avoid erasing wrong device)

Primary LanguagePerlApache License 2.0Apache-2.0

Name

piflash - Raspberry Pi SD-flashing script with safety checks to avoid erasing the wrong device

Synopsis

piflash [--verbose] [--resize] [--config conf-file] input-file output-device

piflash [--verbose] --sdsearch

piflash --version

Featured article

"Getting started with PiFlash: Booting your Raspberry Pi on Linux"
by Ian Kluft at OpenSource.com
March 15, 2019

Description

PiFlash writes (or "flashes") an SD card for a Raspberry Pi. It includes safety checks so that it can only erase and write to an SD card, not another device on the system. The safety checks are probably of most use to beginners. For more advanced users (like the author) it also has the convenience of flashing directly from the file formats downloadable from raspberrypi.org without extracting a .img file from a zip/gz/xz file.

User documentation

PiFlash documentation is available as Unix man-pages and as Perl POD (Plain Old Documentation). Once installed, you can run man or perldoc from a shell to read the documentation:

% man piflash

or

% perldoc piflash

Developer documentation

  • PiFlash - Raspberry Pi SD-flashing script with safety checks to avoid erasing the wrong device
  • PiFlash::Command - process/command running utilities for piflash
  • PiFlash::Hook - named dispatch/hook library for PiFlash
  • PiFlash::Inspector - PiFlash functions to inspect Linux system devices to flash an SD card for Raspberry Pi
  • PiFlash::MediaWriter - write to Raspberry Pi SD card installation with scriptable customization
  • PiFlash::Object - object functions for PiFlash classes
  • PiFlash::Plugin - plugin extension interface for PiFlash
  • PiFlash::State - PiFlash::State class to store configuration, device info and program state

Participation in PiFlash

See the Contributing to PiFlash docs.

When reporting a bug, please include the full output using the --verbose option. That will include all of the program's state information, which will help understand the bigger picture what was happening on your system. Feel free to remove information you don't want to post in a publicly-visible bug report - though it's helpful to add "[redacted]" where you removed something so it's clear what happened.

For any SD card reader hardware which piflash fails to recognize (and therefore refuses to write to), please describe the hardware as best you can including name, product number, bus (USB, PCI, etc), any known controller chips.