Using DD for Windows

First, a precaution:  This will manually remove partitions from the SD Card.  Ensure you follow the steps carefully as you could end up erasing data on other drives in your computer.  This can actually delete the partition that you're currently running Windows on!  But don't worry - I've got some basic steps you can take to make sure you're making the right changes


Images
There are now 3 official images available to download from the Raspberry Pi website (and several unofficial ones that I've heard of):

Fedora 14 remix - raspberrypi-fedora-remix-14-r1.img.gz
Debian squeeze - debian6-17-02-2012.zip
Arch Linux ARM -  archlinuxarm-01-03-2012.zip
EDIT: 2nd Debian Squeeze release - debian6-13-04-2012.zip
EDIT: 3rd Debian Squeeze release - debian6-19-04-2012.zip 

EDIT: Raspbian Wheezy release - 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.zip
NOTE: You'll need something like winrar to unzip the Fedora image


Environment
I'm using Windows 7 Professional, 32-bit.  I understand that Windows 7 64-bit and Windows XP might have a few issues - sorry, I can't help with those.  I would say it's worth giving this a go if you're running one of those OSes and see if it works.


DD For Windows
To apply the image to you'll need to download DD for Windows.  This is a Windows port of the Linux utility - DD.
http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip
Once you have this, unzip it to a local folder that you can get to easily from the command prompt.  In this example I've used c:\temp.  Once unzipped you should see the following:

PLEASE NOTE: You'll also need to copy the image to the same location.


Preparing the SD Card
While in some cases you can simply format the CD card or delete the partition using Windows Computer Manager, if the SD card contains non-Windows partitions (i.e. you're wanting to wipe an existing Raspberry Pi image from the card) you won't be able to do this.  I'm therefore going to take you through identifying and removing any partitions using a utility called DiskPart.  This is part of the Windows 7 operating system, and should be in place in Windows XP (unconfirmed).
PLEASE NOTE: This is where you'll need to be careful

Step 1
Open the command prompt.  Under Windows 7, to ensure you have the required permissions, ensure you're running the command prompt as Administrator:

Type diskpart and press enter.  You'll see the diskpart utility load and be presented with a DISKPART prompt:

Step 2
Type list disk - this will list all disks that DD can see.  Below my main hard drive (Disk 0) and the SD Card (Disk 1) are listed.

NOTE: At this point make careful note of the Disks listed.  In this case, Disk 0, highlighted in red, has a total size of 298GB - this is my Windows operating system.  Disk 1, highlighted in blue, has a total size of 1886 MB - this is my 2GB SD Card.

Step 3
Next you need to select a disk.  In this case I typed select Disk 1.  I see confirmation that this disk has been selected:

NOTE: Make sure you select the SD Card, and not any other disk

 Step 4
Next you need to delete the partitions on the disk, but need to list them first to identify what needs to be deleted.  To do this type list partition.  Here two partitions are listed.  The first is a 100MB boot partition and the other is a 1.5GB ext3 partition (this happens to be a Fedora Pi image):

Step 5
Next you need to select the partition you want to delete.  In this scenario I've select partition by typing select partition 0:

Step 6
Once the partition has been selected, you can delete it. PLEASE NOTE: This will delete whatever partition is selected!!  To delete the selected partition simply type delete partition:

Step 7
Repeat Step 5 and 6 to delete  the second partition

Step 8
Once you've deleted both partitions type list partition again to ensure both partitions have been removed:

To exit, type exit.

Applying the Debian Image
I'll start with the Debian Image first.  To do this, go to the command prompt (ensuring you run this as administrator) and navigate to the directory you extracted the dd utility and the Debian image to.

Step 1
To determine the parameters to use with the dd utility you need to identify two things - the drive letter of the SD card and the path of the image.  In this example my SD Card drive letter is E: and the image is in c:\temp.  The command I've used is therefore:
dd bs=1M if=c:\temp\debian6-17-02-2012.img od=e.

 NOTE: BS refers to the Block Size that should be used - in this case 1MB


The utility will apply the image to the device, providing a running total of the amount of data written so far:

Step 2
To verify the image has been written correctly view the drive in Computer Manager.  While you will be able to see all partitions here, you will only be able to see the 75MB partition in Windows Explorer.

When looking at the partition you will see the following:

Applying the Fedora Image
I've run through the same process to apply the Fedora image and it's exactly the same, except for the command used.  For the Fedora image I used the following:
dd bs=1M if=c:\temp\raspberrypi-fedora-remix-14-r1.img od=e:

The Disk will look like this in Computer Manager.  You'll notice that there's no swap partition on this image:

And the 100MB partition will look like this in Windows Explorer:

Applying the Arch Linux Image
I've run through the same process to apply the Arch Linux image and it's exactly the same, except for the command used.  For the Arch Linux image I used the following:
dd bs=1M if=c:\temp\archlinuxarm-01-03-2012.img od=e:

The Disk will look like this in Computer Manager.  You'll notice that there's no swap partition on this image:

And the 95MB partition will look like this in Windows Explorer:

Applying the 2nd Debian Release (13th April)
Following the release of the 2nd Debian image, here are the details of applying the image to an SD card. As with the other distros, the process is exactly the same, with the only difference being the command (note: change of destination drive letter compared to previous examples):
dd bs=1M if=c:\temp\debian6-13-04-2012.img od=f:

The Disk will look like this in Computer Manager, identical to the original Debian image:

And thbe 75MB partition in Windows Explorer will look like this.  Similar to the original Debian image, but with one extra file - onetime-config: