RaspberryPi4 usb boot

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
21

I just cloned the SD card to an USB drive and it just works:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 status=progress

The boot partition on the USB flash drive mounted as /media/A5FC-5DD4 and the root partition as /media/51ee14ed-4293-4223-afa0-05740ba34772

vi /media/A5FC-5DD4/cmdline.txt
root=UUID=51ee14ed-4293-4223-afa0-05740ba34772 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait quiet osmcdev=rbp4

vi /media/51ee14ed-4293-4223-afa0-05740ba34772/etc/fstab
#/dev/mmcblk0p1  /boot    vfat     defaults,noatime,noauto,x-systemd.automount    0   0
UUID=A5FC-5DD4  /boot    vfat     defaults,noatime,noauto,x-systemd.automount    0   0
22

It will work, but I’d be wary of updates and if you introduce another USB drive on your system (/dev/sdX ordering may change) and our initramfs doesn’t support root UUID labelling fully yet.

23

Hi
this post is old but I still have the same issue:
osmc install failed: could not mount bootfs
Imaged OSMC; one time using OSMC installer and an other time using the raspberry pi imager. Both cases I got that message.
I made sure the Pi firmware is updated and ready to boot from USB.
Is it possible that is still not supported without manual intervention?

24

It’s still not possible. You need an SD card for the boot files.

25

Thank you for answering.
At least I know I am not doing something wrong.
Appreciate…

1 Like
26

Hello

It’s seem to be a recent PR for this feature now.

add uuid and usb booting with fallback to initramfs #745

Any news about this ?

If PR is working, a plan to explain how to create prepare install or migrate existing install to full ssd is planned ?
(If not, I can do that with my recent DeskPi case)

27

I will visit when the kernel is updated