So after winning a Raspberry Pi 2 from the “Growth hack” at a recent Internet of Things & Data event at Microsoft, Reading, I thought it would be only fair to try Windows 10 Core.
The official documentation requires you to have Windows 10 installed to get started however after a little research I was able install it on an SD without installing Windows 10 locally.

Acquiring Windows 10 Core

  • Download the ISO image from the Windows 10 Core Pi setup guide
  • The ISO contains one file. Extract Windows_10_IoT_Core_RPi2.msi
  • Inside the MSI file you will find a FFU file which is needed to image an SD card. Use an unarchiver which supports MSI files, locate the file and extract it. I used Entropy which has a free 15 day trial.

  • Convert the FFU file to an IMG file suitable for use with dd. You can use the ffu2img to convert to IMG. This will require several gigabytes of disk space.

    python ffu2img.py File_WindowsIoTRpi2Flash.ffu

Installing Windows 10 Core on an SD card

  • Insert an SD card into your computer.

  • Locate the SD card in the file system using diskutil (Tip: look at the disk size listed)

    diskutil list

  • Unmount the SD card. Replace diskX with the value you found from the previous step

    sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX

  • Use dd to write the image to the SD Card. Replace the X in rdiskX with the disk number from before.
    We use rdisk as this gives faster write speed to the SD card but it still will take a few minutes.

    sudo dd bs=1m if=File_WindowsIoTRpi2Flash.img of=/dev/rdiskX

Congratulations

You should now have an SD card with the Raspberry Pi build of Windows 10 Core without having to download Windows 10 itself. Pop it in your Pi and check it boots.

Did these steps work for you? Let me know in the comment box.

The next post will look at your options for developing and deploying code to the Pi without having to install Windows 10 locally.