The Vitis IDE has a feature for programming the board/part using JTAG, allowing you to bypass the need to copy the contents of sd_card to an actual SD card to boot on the board.
Programming Flash
After successfully building a System project for hardware, select Program Flash from the Vitis menu in the main menu. You should see a dialog box similar to the following:
In this screen specify the Image File,
which is generally the BOOT.BIN, any offset (if
necessary for the flash memory), in addition to the Init
File. The Init File is the partial PDI from the platform you are
targeting. To make sure the flash is programmed properly, check the Verify after flash check box to confirm it was
programmed properly. If the flash memory already has existing data, you can do a
more secure erase by checking the Blank check after
erase check box to make sure it is fully erased before
programming.
Make sure that the Packaging
options in the System Project
Settings window has --package.boot_mode=qspi set.
Programming the Device
If you do not want to program the flash memory and only want to program the device through JTAG, there is an option under the Vitis menu to select Program Device.