At long last I am sitting at a desk working on my MacBook with the Raspberry PI running next to me.  It is so cute, up and waiting with the command line interface.  What should we do today?  Well, what we do every day – take over the world!  But first, we have to prepare for the unlikely event that we might possibly fail.  If a failure were to occur it seems like a really good idea to have a <gasp> recovery plan.  Since the RPI uses a MicroSD card for it’s boot partition I think I’ll start by having a couple of those ready to go.

The first step is to get a 4 GB or larger micro SD card.  Check.

The next step is to format the card.  Cool, so how does one do that?  Why, by downloading the formatting utility from the SD Card Association, of course.  From this link.

What about a NOOBS installer and Raspbian image?  Well, download those from here.

Extract the files, copy them to the SD card and you should be good to go.