rpi-imager VS alpine-raspberry-pi

It's a bug: https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager/issues/749 It's probably best at the moment to avoid the "lite" version.

I've used Win32 disk imager in the past. I've moved on to Balena Etcher and Raspberry Pi Imager now, but I don't think they ever had a "SD-to-image" functionality.

There are/were issues with using the rpi-imager [1] under Windows, which would result in the configuration information not being written to the memory card. They claimed to have fixed it, but it never worked for me.

Instead, I downloaded a live Linux dist, kde-neon [2], wrote that to a USB stick with rufus [3], booted my PC with that, and imaged under Linux. Only then did it work.

[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager

Use https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager/releases/latest. Scrollll to the bottom, click misc utility images, then bootloader then you can choose to make it boot from usb or sd.. burn it on a sd card and boot from it in pi.

Could you try to use another program to write the image to the sd-card, like the Raspberry Imager?

archlinux-arm/alpine (https://github.com/knoopx/alpine-raspberry-pi)

I personally like Alpine 64 bit for Docker: it is hard to beat Alpine’s speed on the pi. You can build from tarball as mentioned on their website or use a premade image like here.

You can try a premade image here. I know it has armv7 support, not sure if it supports armv6.

You can do it with Alpine. Here is an example.

Alpine runs great on the pi! Check out this script. You can add docker as an additional package, change between armhf and arm64 (with the applicable edits to config.txt in the bootstrap folder,) add docker to the list of startup services, and even configure things like wifi and user accounts. You then build a custom image and flash a preconfigured Alpine OS.