How to get a Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless to connect to wifi automaticly on first boot

NEW POST WRITTEN 2021-08-31 you finding here!

Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless is a very nice Internet of Things computer but its only has mini-hdmi and micro-usb connectors wish make it not so easy to connect to configure to get it up on wifi but after som research i find out that it is possible to configure it to connect to wifi from the first boot of Rasbian.

Rasbian has built in that it copy wifi details from /boot/wpa_supplicant.conf into /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to automatically configure wireless network access.

If a wpa_supplicant.conf file is placed into the /boot/ directory, this will be moved to the /etc/wpa_supplicant/ directory the next time the system is booted, overwriting the network settings; this allows a Wifi configuration to be preloaded onto a card from a Windows or other machine that can only see the boot partition.

Since the /boot partition is accessible by any computer with an SD card reader, wifi configuration is now much simpler.

A skeleton wpa_supplicant.conf file can be as little as:

network={
ssid=”YOUR_SSID”
psk=”YOUR_PASSWORD”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

If you use WPA2-Personal settings with AES you can set the config file to have this text:

network={
ssid=”Your SSID Here”
psk=”YourPresharedKeyHere”
proto=RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
}

I can also recommend to read my post of how to activate the SSH on first boot, click here.

How to make a bootable Windows installtion USB stick

After some searching i find there is some commands that are differents between how people make there own windows installation usb stick, so i taked the one i got to work and write it here.

Start with put in a USB stick to the computer then you should open a command prompt as administrator.

When you have the command prompt  you follow the steps below:

  • DISKPART
  • LIST DISK
    • Find your usb stick in the list
  • SELECT DISK 1
    • Replace DISK 1 with the number your usb stick has
  • CLEAN
  • CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
  • SELECT PARTITION 1
  • ACTIVE
  • FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK
  • ASSIGN
  • EXIT

Don´t close the command prompt.

Mount the ISO or put in your DVD disc so its comming up in “This computer” and remember the drive letter on it and on your USB stick.

Write in your command prompt:

  • G:
    • Where G: is your drive letter of your DVD-Rom
  • CD BOOT
  • BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 H:
    • Where H: is the drive letter on the USB stick)

Now you have a bootable USB stick, now you have to copy the windows installation files.

  • xcopy /h /E /s G:\ H:\
Now you have your own bootable USB stick with your windows installation, now you can restart the computer you like to install it on and setup the BIOS/UEFI to boot from the USB stick.
This is original taken from a tutorial for Windows 7 but i have personally used this tutorial for all kind of Windows versions (8, 8.1, 10, Windows Server 2012, 2016).