Just to note you could probably have done the same, and avoided the need to decompress, by using Pi Imager. Burning the image has been working fine since version 1.x days.Well I have now had success but using Balena Etcher and then doing some editing.
I downloaded the xz file relating to 64bit recommended version and ran unxz to decompress it.
Then I used etcher to write it to the sd card.
After that I remounted it so I had access to bootfs and rootfs
It is how to then configure the burned card for headless booting which has always been the challenge.
The options are to not do the initial boot headless, which can be a pain on any of the Zero range and other Pi if you don't have an appropriate HDMI lead, or edit the card before booting which is a pain if using Windows and it can only see the FAT partition on the card.
Later versions of Pi Imager, along with changes in the images themselves, were intended to avoid all that faff by allowing configuration and customisation before burning. That wasn't always successful, especially under Windows, but the latest 2.0.3 should have most of the issues ironed out even if some problems are still reported.
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Sat Dec 27, 2025 6:10 pm