I bought three 64GB SanDisk microSD cards this week.
I figure, one for my wife's phone, one for my new underwater shock resistance travel cam, and another one for the Raspberry Pi.
These microSDX come with SD adapters. So I thought it would be perfect. I download Raspbian, and install it on a SD card with UnetBootin, and then put it in my raspberry pi, power it up and NOTHING!
I was pretty shocked, there were multiple points of failure here. I had no choice but to try alternate methods.
I saw on adafruit that they sell a kit with SD / cables / case for 105USD. I felt remorse not being aware of this earlier, as I glanced on my Pi tangling off the edge of my desk, suspended by an HDMI cable.
"Definitely worth it," I thought, "Maybe next time." That is if I can get the current investment to pay off in some form of achievement. I had no choice but to venture worth and attempt yet another method.
I tried to download Fedora's image installer utility as outlined by the adafruit tutorials. Alas, to no avail. The utility software could not recognize my external devices. A few horrible thoughts later, I found the solution back on the pi's flagship site, where I downloaded the OS in the first place.
They pointed me to an image writer utility on launchpads website. So once again I tried loading the Raspbian image file unto the microSD card. It loaded rather quickly, and I stuck the SD card in the Pi.
I powered it up and I was super excited, watching the green light flash for the first time, and the OS load up on the screen, from my dangling Pi. :)
Thinking back to why I didn't find the solution on the Pi's .org site in the first place. I realize I depend on google too much!
I googled each task separately, and went with the results, looking for a quick fix each time.