Raspberry Pi Imager – destination full

Have you ever tried to start from scratch – write a new Raspbian image to an SD card you’ve used before?

Unless I’m alone an existing image causes Raspberry Pi Imager to report “Destination disk full” and will not allow you to override that even if you don’t care that it’s already full. (At least on v1.3 with my Mac on OS X 10.15.7).

Formatting with many of the easily available tools also got me nowhere so I’m writing down my successful method then I can find it again sometime…

Step 1

Identify the disk so you can be sure to erase the correct one – I’ve never managed to erase the wrong one but I’m sure that would be a few days of hell!

From a terminal window, and with the SD card inserted

disktutil list

Find the disk in the list that’s produced. If, like me, you have only two disks available (the SD card and Macintosh HD) it should be easy to be sure, based on the sizes at the very least.

Step 2

Then, for my case on this occasion targeting /dev/disk2

diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 /dev/disk2

Step 3

Return to Raspberry Pi Imager v1.3 and try again….success (in my case!)