Thursday November 07 2019 13:10, you wrote to RobH:
I use a 3B+ sitting in a x830 box and card with a 1TB dasd . The drive has the Rasbian installed and it powers up, boots to the the USB drive.
Every thing works - so far but I do not run it daily just as a when as I use a server system for day to day development and other activities such as BBS, FTP, SQL, Apache, IBM m/f server or services. This hold a lot of dasd unit giving over 10+ TB storage all in 16GB Ram with a modular PSU so it is light on power needs but a Pi is a heck of a lot less :)
Did want to get a Pi4 but will not fit into the current X830 case so will wait until a revised X830 combo comes out.
Not a Pi4 but I have Pi3+s booting from SD card (holding only the /boot partition) and 128/256Gb SSD (mSATA in mSATA to USB3 adapter) as root. Quite easy if you follow the instructions. I never had much luck booting directly from the USB SSD, hence the above arrangement.
From my searches, back in July , it couldn't be done with a pi 4, but in October, there's a youtube video showing how to add a ssd for a NAS drive on the Pi 4, but no actual instuctions for getting it to either boot or work. The person doing the video is using OpenMediaVault for the NAS storage, which is not what I want.
Install Raspbian (other OSs are available) onto SD card as usual. Update as necessary. Format external drive. Include a swap partition, root partition plus any extra ones required.
Make a note of UUID/PARTUUID of the new root (and swap if used) partition. (see "man blkid"). Mount the new root partition on (say) /mnt and then rsync -avx / /mnt to get the OS onto the usb drive.
You now need to change the cmdline.txt file on the SD card boot partition to add to the root= parameter. Make a copy before you edit this file. Should look something like this:
Note the PARTUUID is the one you remember from your note above. (You can use the UUID instead, though; root=UUID=uuidfromabove). net.ifnames=0 and biosdevname=0 makes the ethernet and wireless ports revert to eth0 and wlan0. usbhid.mousepoll=0 compensates for a USB mouse on my system. Commands in cmdline.txt must be all one line, and only on one line. Remove any blank lines in the file.
Now edit /etc/fstab on the NEW root partition (/mnt/). If there is an entry for /dev/mmcblk0p2 on /, change the /dev/mmcblk0p2 to UUID=theuuidfromabove. If not OK, it'll find it from the cmdline.txt file. Put a new entry: /dev/mmcbl0p2 /mnt/oldroot ext4 noauto,defaults 0 0 (and remember to make directory /mnt/oldroot AFTER unmounting the new root partition). This will stop your old root being mounted at boot. (You can still mount it with mounr /mnt/oldroot, if necessary.)
Add an entry for swap if using a partition.
umount /mnt; mkdir /mnt/oldroot
Reboot and keep your fingers crossed.
I don't think I've left anything out!!
If it fails, take out the SD card and revert the cmdline.txt file in another computer. It's on a vfat partition so a Windows PC can read it, too. Put it back and reboot. Check all the above. If it still fails, note the errors and come back.
Using the x830 it is simply a matter for using the s/w Ercher (spelling ? ) with the USB DASD loaded to copy over the iso Rasp image to the drive as I did not find an easy solution for copying the SD card to the drive.
Once done then remove the SD card and turn on - it will boot to the USB drive which is quicker than using a SD card and more realiable.
That said another poster has said that there is a problem with the bootloader in the pi 4 that does not allow this at the moment and here is the details of the current state of play with it (Bootloader EEPROM) :
-!- From url
formatting link
TODAY.
Raspberry Pi4 bootloader EEPROM release notes
2019-10-17 - rpi-eeprom-update + recovery.bin
New beta recovery.bin which can update the VLI EEPROM before start.elf is loaded. This is the recommended and default method because no USB devices will be in use at this stage.
Extend the USE_FLASHROM configuration to use the vl805 tool to program the VL805 directly.
Generate SHA256 checksums in .sig files for the bootloader and and VL805 images. This is required by the new recovery.bin to guard against corrupted files being flashed to the EEPROM(s).
Various variable renames to distinguish between the bootloader and the VL805 images.
2019-10-16 - Git 18472066 (BETA)
Ignore trailing characters when parsing in PXE boot menu option. Improve error handling with unformatted sd-cards.
2019-10-08 - Git 26dd3686c (BETA)
TFTP now uses RFC2348 blksize option to get 1024 byte blocks if the server supports it. Fix DHCP handling of SI_ADDR TFTP_PREFIX and TFTP_PREFIX_STR options for mac-address or string literal prefix. Improved support for standard capacity and SDv1 cards.
2019-09-25 - Git 4d9824321 (BETA)
Increase TFTP timeout to 30s as default & bootconf.txt Fix intermittent boot freeze/slowdown issue after loading start.elf Don't load start.elf during network boot if start4.elf exists but the download times out.
2019-09-23 - Git c67e8bb3 (BETA)
Add support for network boot Configurable ordering for boot modes (BOOT_ORDER and SD/NET_BOOT retries)
2019-09-10 - Git f626c772
Configure ethernet RGMII pins at power on. This is a minor change which which may improve reliability of ethernet for some users.
2019-09-05 - Git d8189ed4 - (BETA)
Update SDRAM setup to reduce power consumption.
2019-07-15 - Git 514670a2
Turn green LED activity off on halt. Pad embedded config file with spaces for easier editing by end users. Halt now behaves the same as earlier Pi models to improve power behavior at halt for HATs. WAKE_ON_GPIO now defaults to 1 in the EEPROM config file. POWER_OFF_ON_HALT setting added defaulting to zero. Set this to 1 to restore the behavior where 'sudo halt' powers off all PMIC output. If WAKE_ON_GPIO=1 then POWER_OFF_ON_HALT is ignored. Load start4db.elf / fixup4db.dat in preference to start_db.elf / fixup_db.dat on Pi4. Embed BUILD_TIMESTAMP in the EEPROM image to assist version checking.
2019-05-10 - Git d2402c53 (RC2.1)
First production version.
-!-
Look like I will wait some what longer for this to be fixed before I consider getting the newer Pi as in 5 months not a lot has happened on this front.
I do not quite see the advantage of booting from USB harddisk. I like the SDcard, if it ever fails (so far after years none have on any of my raspies), then I have backup images of the cards on a PC harddisk. I make backup images of the cards after every major change. If a card was to fail then just write a new card, put it in the Pi, works again. FYI I have dropped a harddisk, big data loss. I have dropped several SDcards, no problem ;-)
- but I, with an SSD and RPi3B+, via a mSATA to USB adapter, simply 'burnt' the SSD with UbuntuMATE as if it were an SD card, and it all works without the card installed. /With/ the card installed, the beast boots from the card with the SSD still plugged in.
--
Mark J
From RISCOS 5.27 on a BeagleBoard-xM and Raspberry Pi2B
- and Linux on a PandaBoard ES and Raspberry Pi3B
An unrelated question: How did you get Ubuntu mate installed, as In tried and it didn't work. I downloaded the tar.gz file, then extracted the img file and the tried to burn it to an sd card with etcher. Etcher complained that it was not a bootable image. I tried again by clicking on the tar.gz file and Discs came up and said something about doing a restore. I selected the sdcard and clicked restore, but after inserting the sdcard into the pi, it didn't boot up.
As I said above, I've never got this to work. Seems (from some reading) some USB devices don't work easily. I gave up and used the SD card to boot, USB to run.
Use dd to get the image onto the USB device on a Linux box.
On the Ubuntu-MATE RPi page: Ubuntu MATE 18.04.2 is available for Raspberry Pi Model B 2, 3 and 3+ with separate images for armhf (ARMv7 32-bit) and arm64 (ARMv8 64-bit). We have done what we can to optimise the builds for the Raspberry Pi without sacrificing the full desktop environment Ubuntu MATE provides on PC.
No mention of Pi4. Pi4 does have different hardware. A special version of Raspbian was developed to work on Pi4 - kernel 4.19.
I just use dd to burn the extracted image file running on the same UbuntuMATE. I am nervous of the automatic Restore that Etcher seems to want to do. Perhaps too easy to mess up your resident OS :-(
--
Mark J
From RISCOS 5.27 on a BeagleBoard-xM and Raspberry Pi2B
- and Linux on a PandaBoard ES and Raspberry Pi3B
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