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Booting PI from USB

Posted: Friday 31 August 2018 8:25
by emme
Ciao,

I recently discovered that Raspberry PI3b and PI3B+ support boot from USB with no longer need of the SDCard
I tried with a 250Gb Sata disk and it worked quite well...

my intention was, now, to move my server installation to a 120Gb SSD for the following reasons:

- SD Cards are almost faulty... I already burn 3 in the past
- Small and cheap SSD (less than 80Gb) are normally made by microsd chips instead of SSD chipsets

The PI gains in speed and I'm planning to move all separated server to just one device:

- Domoticz
- Node
- NodeRed/dashboard
- MQTT Broker
- BLE/BT scan

I hope this would help someone else....

here is how to do that:
You will need an SD Card with the most recent rPI image on it

before boot the first time on the SD card edit the config.txt and add the following line:
program_usb_boot_mode=1
save and insert the SD into the PI and boot it.

now you can shut it down and remove the SDCard

on the USB disk burn the most recent rPI image
plug it to the PI
power it up... that's all!

(note that you will need a 3A power supply!!)
ciao
M

Re: Booting PI from USB

Posted: Friday 31 August 2018 10:40
by freijn
****Warning*****

The change is permanent !! So make sure your Pi can read the SSD and its not an nice experiment , its permanent.....

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... des/msd.md

Before a Raspberry Pi 3 will boot from a mass storage device, it needs to be booted from an SD card with a config option to enable USB boot mode. This will set a bit in the OTP (One Time Programmable) memory in the Raspberry Pi SoC that will enable booting from a USB mass storage device. Once this bit has been set, the SD card is no longer required. Note that any change you make to the OTP is permanent and cannot be undone.

Re: Booting PI from USB

Posted: Friday 31 August 2018 10:48
by JuanUil
Will Domoticz be installed on the ssd automatically when you boot from ssd?

Re: Booting PI from USB

Posted: Friday 31 August 2018 11:36
by snuiter
:lol:

Re: Booting PI from USB

Posted: Friday 31 August 2018 11:50
by poudenes
I did this on all my rpi. When I add a sdcard it still boot also from it. First it check. Then it boot from usb


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Re: Booting PI from USB

Posted: Friday 31 August 2018 11:58
by EdwinK
Good to read. Got an older 2TB drive (just a normal harddrive, no SSD) laying around. Might be worth thinking about it doing it this way. Drive is self powered, so I think we should be good.