- In a terminal window, write the image to the card with the command below, making sure you replace the input file `if=` argument with the path to your `.img` file, and the `/dev/sdX` in the output file `of=` argument with the correct device name. **This is very important, as you will lose all the data on the hard drive if you provide the wrong device name.** Make sure the device name is the name of the whole SD card as described above, not just a partition. For example: `sdd`, not `sdds1` or `sddp1`; `mmcblk0`, not `mmcblk0p1`.

```bash

```

- Please note that block size set to `4M` will work most of the time. If not, try `1M`, although this will take considerably longer.

The following command unzips the zip file (replace 2019-07-10-raspbian-stretch.zip with the appropriate zip filename), and pipes the output directly to the dd command. This in turn copies it to the SD card, as described in the previous section.

- To see the progress of the copy operation, you can run the dd command with the status option.

```

- If you are using an older version of `dd`, the status option may not be available. You may be able to use the `dcfldd` command instead, which will give a progress report showing how much has been written. Another method is to send a USR1 signal to `dd`, which will let it print status information. Find out the PID of `dd` by using `pgrep -l dd` or `ps a | grep dd`. Then use `kill -USR1 PID` to send the USR1 signal to `dd`.