Booting from a hard disk?

Much too complicated.

As Chris Elvidge says in message: Subject: Re: External disk with the pi 4, anyone Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2019 13:10:14 +0000 Message-ID: , it is much easier to use the SD card just for /boot, and put the rootfs on a harddisk

My setup is usually :

pi@f7p4:~ $ lsblk -o name,fstype,mountpoint,label,parttype,partlabel,partuuid

NAME FSTYPE MOUNTPOINT LABEL PARTTYPE PARTLABEL PARTUUID sda

+-sda1 vfat 0xc 32ebda7d-01 +-sda2 ext4 / rootfs 0x83 32ebda7d-02 +-sda3 ext4 /extra 0x83 32ebda7d-03 mmcblk0 +-mmcblk0p1 vfat /boot boot 0xc 5e3da3da-01 +-mmcblk0p2 ext4 rootfs 0x83 5e3da3da-02

pi@f7p4:~ $ cat /boot/cmdline.txt # (all on one line!) console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=32ebda7d-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait

pi@f7p4:~ $ cat /etc/fstab # device mntpnt type options dump passno proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 # SD card PARTUUID=5e3da3da-01 /boot vfat defaults 0 2 # SSD / HD PARTUUID=32ebda7d-02 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1 PARTUUID=32ebda7d-03 /extra ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2 # a swapfile is not a swap partition, no line here # use dphys-swapfile swap[on|off] for that

Note: /extra is a partition for data / homedirs, that will survive replacement of boot/root.

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Regards, 
Kees Nuyt

The idea is to get away from SD cards altogether.

What you contributed subsequently was Linux jabber, and not relevant to other approaches.

AFAIK the pi cannot boot *entirely* from hard disk.

It needs a boostrap SD card

Wrong side of the bed?

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?when things get difficult you just have to lie?

Pi4 cannot, yet. Pi3 very easily:

Pi from 3 is supposed to be able to boot from USB with an updated setting (add program_usb_boot_mode=1 to the end of /boot/config.txt, and reboot) but I've never got it to work. YMMV.

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Chris Elvidge, England

Thanks for sharing your opinion.

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Regards, 
Kees Nuyt