Raspberry Pi Imager, a tool that helps users easily write OS images to an SD card for booting a Raspberry Pi, has just released version 2.0.4, now available for download.
A new write progress watchdog actively monitors stalled operations, while additional recovery strategies address problematic async I/O scenarios by dynamically reducing queue depth or falling back to synchronous writes when required. Timeout handling has been standardized across platforms, with a five-minute emergency timeout acting as a final safeguard against unresponsive operations.
Performance diagnostics also see improvements. The imager now captures SHA256 hash values as part of performance profiles, allowing better verification and troubleshooting when write anomalies occur. Monitoring around recovery events has been expanded, providing clearer insight into failure conditions during imaging.
Moreover, image handling has been refined to better support modern installation media. Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.4 can now parse compressed .gz files to determine uncompressed size information ahead of flashing, and it improves handling of image files larger than 4 GB, a common requirement for newer operating system images.
Disk formatting reliability has been improved, particularly for larger storage devices. The update fixes FAT32 formatting issues affecting drives larger than 8 GB and improves root directory handling based on sectors-per-cluster calculations, addressing edge cases seen with high-capacity USB flash drives and SD cards.
Several Linux-specific fixes also landed in this release. AppImage builds no longer fail when invoking external tools such as runuser or xdg-open, resolving LD_LIBRARY_PATH conflicts that caused PAM module loading errors.
Audio notifications now follow XDG conventions, using canberra-gtk-play and PipeWire on Linux, which fixes missing or broken notification sounds on Raspberry Pi OS systems that no longer ship PulseAudio control by default.
Finally, on the accessibility side, when a screen reader is active, the confirmation dialog timer is now bypassed, preventing unintended cancellations for users relying on assistive technologies.
Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.4 is available now for Raspberry Pi OS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. For more details, visit the changelog. You can grab the latest version from the official Raspberry Pi website or download the AppImage from the project’s GitHub repo.
