This is on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) board. I have a USB enclosure with a NVMe SSD. It would be great to boot from it instead of a small microSD card. I also plan to install multiple OS's on it though only installed Pi OS only right now. Here is how to boot from USB massive storage device (MSD).
Etcher can actually make a bootable SD card from any operating system image, but we'll be using it for Raspberry Pi images more than anything else. Just download the version of Etcher for your. The Raspberry Pi is an incredible little computer made up of a components and connectors on an unfeasibly small printed circuit board that is approximately the dimensions of a credit card. Depending upon your intended use, your Rasberry Pi may have a keyboard, monitor and mouse added.
There are following topics here:
- Boot from USB SSD / MSD
- Boot BerryBoot from USB SSD and install multiple OS
- PINN is another great tool but I don't have success
Boot from USB SSD / MSD
This is not hard and slightly different with the new Pi 4 board. Just need to follow this excellent guide on Tomshardware, in the exact way to ensure easy success.
First the first, I still need a Pi OS installed and running from NOOBS or even better, the plain image. We need to update the firmware under it. Where to view. And the plain image is needed anyways.
Once you get the latest plain Pi OS image. You can use Raspberry Pi Imager to put it on a SD card. Maybe it can write to your USB SSD directly. I didn't try. You can pick either of the plain Pi OS image, just don't get the NOOBS image. Lite image is smallest, desktop image is medium and can still be put on a 4GB SD card (the size doesn't matter if you know how to write it to USB SSD directly), and the full image takes double the time to download. I don't see the Pi Imager saves the image file anywhere. So I prefer to download manually.
Another reason to keep the image file is I already installed the OS on NOOBS microSD card come with the kit I bought. And I found it is more handy to do it on Pi OS than a PC with Windows. wget downloaded the image much faster than web browser on Windows. It is also easy to use command line to burn the image:
After the image is copied, two partitions will be created on the SSD and could be mounted automatically under:
We need to download the .dat and .elf files from firmware release from May 22 and copy them to the /media/pi/boot directory. Otherwise it will hit error saying newer software is needed when booting up. You can use wget to download from the raw link to the files. Totally 16 files with similar names. It is easy to reuse the wget command line while slightly change the file name.
Then update the firmware to the version dated 2020-05-15 following the Tomshardware guide. Newer firmware normally works too. The 06-15 one is what I am using. It is also the latest stable one.
Now you can shutdown, power off, remove the microSD card and boot to USB SSD. Once boots up, it will resize the ext4 partition to cover the whole SSD. You then go through the short setup steps and update process of several minutes to get the OS finally running. You can get more applications to make it same as the full Pi OS image.
Use BerryBoot to install multiple OS
BerryBoot V2.0 is a great tool for this. It boots up kernel and a tiny system running the app to let you install multiple OS. Just need one little tweak.
Create a small fat32 partition as the first partition on your USB drive.
Get the current berryboot-20200612-pi4.zip
Unzip it onto the fat32 partition you created before.
Now the trick:
Modify the cmdline.txt in the boot partition, add bootdev= with the UUID above so it is like:
Flush the latest stable firmware that enables USB boot as above. Once it is done, run sudo halt, turn off power, take out microSD card, keep USB drive plugged, and power on. It should boot up correctly and start Berryboot tool now.
Raspberry Pi Iso Burner
Use PINN to install multiple OS
PINN is another great tool, very similar.
PINN shows USB boot support in the changelog. I got the zip file, unzip it to the fat32 partition on SSD, but it can't boot from USB SSD. I only see the rainbow square screen.
From the files in PINN I see it is using recovery style image. BerryBoot is using OS image. Theoretically they should both be able to work if crafted to load kernel and initrd ramdisk image correctly from the boot device. Maybe something is still not right.
I also tried the NOOBS image. The first partition is for recovery and the recovery image failed to load. It complains about missing fixup4rc.dat which doesn't exist. Maybe this is the reason we still need those files dated 05-22 as in the guide from Tomshardware.
My preferred method for writing an Raspberry Pi SD card image is a tool called Etcher. It is free, works on Windows, Linux and Mac and has a nice clean interface. The newer version even allows multiple SD cards to be written at the same time.
Burn Image To Raspberry Pi Emulator
Download and Install Etcher
Etcher can be downloaded from https://www.balena.io/etcher/. The Windows version is available in Portable and Installed versions for both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. I use it on my Windows PC and Ubuntu laptop.
To our surprise there was nothing out there that fitted our needs. So we built Etcher, a SD card burner app that is simple for end users, extensible for developers, and works on any platform. – resin.io Team
Download Your Favourite Raspberry Pi Image
How To Burn Raspberry Pi Image To Sd
Download your preferred SD card image. If in doubt the Official Raspbian (with Desktop) image from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website is a good start : Official Raspbian SD Card Images
Using Etcher to Write a Raspberry Pi SD Card Image
The interface looks like this :
Step 1
Browse to the image file. This can be a conventional img file or a zip file. This allows you to burn Raspberry Pi images without even extracting them from the source Zip files.
Step 2
Select a drive. The list of drives provides a nice set of information so it should be clearer exactly what physical device you are selecting. You can select multiple drives and it is possible to write multiple SD cards at the same time.
Step 3
Wait for the process to complete.
Once the process has finished you have the option to burn the same image again or to choose a different image.
Troubleshooting
Depending on the state of the SD card you are using you may need to format it first. On Windows I always use the official SD Formatter application.
Overall I'm very impressed and not sure if SD card image burning can get any easier than this!
