Booting and OS

[777upender]

Hello

I am very new to the forum and today i bought Raspberry pi 3 along with desktop and now i have sd card slot on back of my Raspberry pi 3 (i prefer 32GB sandisk micro sd). Besides i also have an other alternative adding an SSD drive to the Pi-Desktop kit

My question would be how to boot my Raspberry pi 3 and which OS should i prefer NOOBS or Raspbian. Could someone help me

Thanking you

[B.Goode]

Visiting the Raspberry Pi Foundation website, selecting Help from the menu, then clicking on the Getting Started box would be a good start. It will link you to all the documentation available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

There is no choice to be made between NOOBS and Raspbian.

NOOBS is an Installer which can help you to get an Operating System installed on your microSD card.

Raspbian is the Operating System that is recommended and supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Download it from the official download site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

So Raspbian is what you need to use. If you are puzzled by the process of 'flashing' an image to the microSD card you may find it easier to use the NOOBS Installer.

[topguy]

Dont assume that everyone here automatically know what the "Pi-desktop-kit" is there are a lot of different kits available around the world.
Is it the Element 14 one ? ( https://www.element14.com/community/doc ... desktop-pc )

Have you read this ? https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/hardware-guide/
Do you still have questions about "how to boot" ?

NOOBS is not really an OS, its a tool that allow you to install one ( or more ) different OS on your SD card. Raspbian is one of those OSs.
NOOBS are slightly easier for a total beginner and will allow you to install multiple OSs to test.

But people that know exactly what they need, will download OS images directly. And save a bit of space on the SD cards, for a 32GB card that space doesnt matter much.

[W. H. Heydt]

NOOBS is not really an OS, its a tool that allow you to install one ( or more ) different OS on your SD card. Raspbian is one of those OSs.
NOOBS are slightly easier for a total beginner and will allow you to install multiple OSs to test.

Well... Maybe... Given the number of posters that have various troubles with NOOBS, it's not all that clear what "easier" is in this context. All in all, there are fewer steps to go through writing an image file directly to an SD card. Granted, some of those steps are outside the comfort zone for some people, but then so is the occasional need to reformat an SD card to use NOOBS.

[777upender]

Thanks a lot.
Yes i use Element 14 desktop and i have an optional storage msata connector. Now i would like to know if i can boot the OS from SSD which is connected to msata connector

Visiting the Raspberry Pi Foundation website, selecting Help from the menu, then clicking on the Getting Started box would be a good start. It will link you to all the documentation available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

There is no choice to be made between NOOBS and Raspbian.

NOOBS is an Installer which can help you to get an Operating System installed on your microSD card.

Raspbian is the Operating System that is recommended and supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Download it from the official download site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

So Raspbian is what you need to use. If you are puzzled by the process of 'flashing' an image to the microSD card you may find it easier to use the NOOBS Installer.

[777upender]

Thanks a lot

Visiting the Raspberry Pi Foundation website, selecting Help from the menu, then clicking on the Getting Started box would be a good start. It will link you to all the documentation available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

There is no choice to be made between NOOBS and Raspbian.

NOOBS is an Installer which can help you to get an Operating System installed on your microSD card.

Raspbian is the Operating System that is recommended and supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Download it from the official download site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

So Raspbian is what you need to use. If you are puzzled by the process of 'flashing' an image to the microSD card you may find it easier to use the NOOBS Installer.

[777upender]

Thanks a lot

Visiting the Raspberry Pi Foundation website, selecting Help from the menu, then clicking on the Getting Started box would be a good start. It will link you to all the documentation available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

There is no choice to be made between NOOBS and Raspbian.

NOOBS is an Installer which can help you to get an Operating System installed on your microSD card.

Raspbian is the Operating System that is recommended and supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Download it from the official download site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

So Raspbian is what you need to use. If you are puzzled by the process of 'flashing' an image to the microSD card you may find it easier to use the NOOBS Installer.

[fruitoftheloom]

Thanks a lot.
Yes i use Element 14 desktop and i have an optional storage msata connector. Now i would like to know if i can boot the OS from SSD which is connected to msata connector

Visiting the Raspberry Pi Foundation website, selecting Help from the menu, then clicking on the Getting Started box would be a good start. It will link you to all the documentation available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

There is no choice to be made between NOOBS and Raspbian.

NOOBS is an Installer which can help you to get an Operating System installed on your microSD card.

Raspbian is the Operating System that is recommended and supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Download it from the official download site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

So Raspbian is what you need to use. If you are puzzled by the process of 'flashing' an image to the microSD card you may find it easier to use the NOOBS Installer.

It is all explained in the documentation available on Element14 web site:

https://www.element14.com/community/doc ... desktop-pc

[topguy]

NOOBS is not really an OS, its a tool that allow you to install one ( or more ) different OS on your SD card. Raspbian is one of those OSs.
NOOBS are slightly easier for a total beginner and will allow you to install multiple OSs to test.

Well... Maybe... Given the number of posters that have various troubles with NOOBS, it's not all that clear what "easier" is in this context. All in all, there are fewer steps to go through writing an image file directly to an SD card. Granted, some of those steps are outside the comfort zone for some people, but then so is the occasional need to reformat an SD card to use NOOBS.

I'll claim that NOOBS makes it easier/faster to check out alternative OSs like OpenElec, OSMC and RiscOS and even have more than one installed at the same time.

Everyone can run into trouble with SD cards, those who dont have any trouble wont post on the forum. So one could take the amount of posts related to NOOBS as an indication that it is widely used.

[jahboater]

I thought now that etcher is available, is easy to use, does it all including the unzip, that NOOB's was deprecated and documentation suggesting it being removed.

With etcher, there is no need to unzip the image (difficult on some versions of Windows), there is no need to format the card first (which leads to countless problems), and it just works.

True it doesn't do multi-boot but there are other mechanisms for that.

[HawaiianPi]

Yes i use Element 14 desktop and i have an optional storage msata connector. Now i would like to know if i can boot the OS from SSD which is connected to msata connector

Yes, but you need to be able to boot from an SD card to set that up, so flash a Raspbian image to your SD card and get your Pi3 booting from that first. After that, we can point you to the relative documentation for USB booting.

Also note that the Pi bootloader is rather primitive, due to limited space on the SoC, so USB boot does not work with every device. The alternative is to start the boot process from the SD card and then load and run the OS from your USB device (SSD). That's the way I have my Pi3B with SSD set up.

[777upender]

Dont assume that everyone here automatically know what the "Pi-desktop-kit" is there are a lot of different kits available around the world.
Is it the Element 14 one ? ( https://www.element14.com/community/doc ... desktop-pc )

Have you read this ? https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/hardware-guide/
Do you still have questions about "how to boot" ?

NOOBS is not really an OS, its a tool that allow you to install one ( or more ) different OS on your SD card. Raspbian is one of those OSs.
NOOBS are slightly easier for a total beginner and will allow you to install multiple OSs to test.

But people that know exactly what they need, will download OS images directly. And save a bit of space on the SD cards, for a 32GB card that space doesnt matter much.

Could you please let me know what exactly OS images mean??

[B.Goode]

Could you please let me know what exactly OS images mean??

Something like -

"A file which contains a bit-by-bit representation of the content needed to produce an exact replica of a CD, microSD card, or some other storage medium."

[jahboater]

Could you please let me know what exactly OS images mean??

It goes like this ....
An engineer at the RPF installs the Raspbian OS onto a disk.
He then takes a copy of the raw disk (thats below the partition level) into a single file.
This is the "image" file because it is a complete "image" or copy of the installed OS, it results in a file called "2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch.img". The engineer then compresses that file with zip, giving the resulting file called "2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch.zip".

To use it, it must be uncompressed (unzipped) back to the ".img" image file. Then that image file is simply copied onto your raw disk. So you do not have to "install" Raspbian, it has been done for you.

Because the image file is below the partition level, you do not format the SD card first, the two partitions magically appear after you have copied the file onto the SD card.

Nowadays there is a nice GUI app that does it all for you called etcher. It does the unzip and then does the copy, and is the recommended method now.

[MaxK1]

Compare that with the installation of Unix V7 on a PDP-11...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1_Jn6 ... NDQTA/view