This is possible for Raspbian for Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, 3A+ and Raspberry Pi 2B v1.2. See here.
It would be good if Hass.os for these devices could be made to work the same way.
It will soon be possible to boot from USB for Rasberry Pi 4B (apparently), and it would be good if this image also supported boot from USB.
This would enable Raspberry Pi users to use SSD drives for the boot drive, rather than SD cards which can be slow and unreliable.
Thank you.
This would be a perfect package of software & hardware I reckon, would love to have it!
I really wonder why it does not work with hassos
I can burn a Rasbian image on SD card or a USB drive.
Same with an Ubuntu Mate image for Raspberry. It runs happily from both.
There are other software packs I have tried that also works both places. On most of my various Raspberry Pi based projects I buy a cheap USB SSD of 64 or 128 GB because it is faster and much more reliable.
But HassOS will not boot at all. Just black screen. I wonder if the developers of this OS have hardcoded some device names that prevents booting from a different device name than the internal SD card. It has to be something simple since everything else I have tried just boots happily from USB.
Originally the Raspberry Pi had to be activated for USB boot (an OTP memory setting). But Raspberry Pi 3+ boots from USB out of the box
With Raspberry Pi 4 it becomes much more attractive to boot from USB SSD because it should be as fast as the disk can read and write which is an order of magnitude faster than the SD card. And no reliability issue
ONE experience - I never got the small USB SSDs from Western Digital to work. They have some firmware issue - both that I tried. But the Samsung SSDs and many different no-name China SSDs as well as small USB2SATA enclosures all work great on a Raspberry. Watch out for the small WD USB SSDs. They install but then have bit errors until it all crashes with permanent errors all over the disk.
Asked about this here on the Raspberry Pi forum to try and find out what is needed to make this work for us!
Lets make this happen. The perfect solution essentially!
Im keen for this too
Looks like this might be go!
Great to see this. Anyone tried it out yet? Bring on the pi 4 support!
Pi 4 support for Hass.os is also coming.
The blocking factor here will be that the Pi4 firmware doesnāt currently support USB boot.
So we can have Pi 4 or USB boot but not both.
Itās up to the Rasberry Pi team to implement support for USB boot on Pi 4. Hopefully not long.
Why not both?
ā¦put the mechanism in place, but make it require a) a config variable that has to be manually changed or b) something like the way we config wifi via config on a USBā¦
Something manual with lots of comments saying 'Pi4 does not currently support non-mSD boot options link to raspberrypi.org post. At this time USB Boot is only available for Pi2, 3 and 3B+ link to home-assistant.io post
ā¦as it stands for meā¦ Iāve already gone through all of my Pis moving each variant in itās optimum deployment (OSMC and HASS get 3B+'s, OctoPi gets a 2ā¦ or was it a basic 3?.. I think both my 2ās have hardware defects (one is bricked, other has dead WiFi) ā¦anywaysā¦ in the end, I still have 2 Pi3ās for project development (three projects currently on-holdā¦ GSM/GPS, GoogleAIY and one is currently sandwiched between a 2.5" HDD addon card and a m.2 addon card)
ā¦point isā¦ aside from USB3ā¦ Iām not sure that I see a whole lot of benefit from moving HASS to a Pi4ā¦ but Iād get started on USB-boot with a Pi3 this weekend if I couldā¦
Actuallyā¦ anyone care to recommend some preparatory reading on the subject of USB booting HASS?
Because both wonāt work? You cannot boot from USB on RPi 4.
Iām sure the Hass.os software supports both; but you cannot use them both in conjunction at the moment, since the RPi 4 does not support USB Boot. When that is resolved it should all work.
Perhaps you misunderstoodā¦ I was asking of support for both under the āorā conditional, not āandā?
Correct me if Iām mistaken, but HassOS does not currently support usb-boot on any Pi-variant natively?
Guys, I have heard it should be possbile to boot any OS via USB, you just need to put an SD card with some code that tells the Pi to boot from USB.
Details differ for version of Pi, but yesā¦ thatās true, but the devil is in the detailsā¦ workarounds exist for pretty much every problem in life, but workarounds come with their own consequencesā¦
Piās in general donāt have the best history with their primary storage medium. I think all of us have reliability in the primary goal category. Itās not that I strictly care (*) what Hass is running off of, more that I donāt want the PI booting off SD.
(* - Iām not exactly thrilled about running a frequently accessed database from SD)
Maybe weād be better off with another option other than Pi.
You make a good point. People are building alarms with these things, they canāt just die.
Perhaps you misunderstood - i was always taking about the āandā condition from the beginning. If itās āorā then itās not both - itās one or the other.
By definition it is then not booting from USB.
Aye. That is likely true for the most partā¦ but in my specific case there are reasons that Iād like to stay in the RaspPi family as much as possible, reasons that are largely ideological. ie: I think the rise of SBCs in general is a wonderful thing from a hindsight perspective (the kids now that were like me then? ā¦a $35 deck-of-cards sized PC?) and in keeping with that Iām always on the lookout for ways to USE a Pi.
But yes. there are alternatives, likely better alternatives and itās the same thing as me considering a different SBC to replace the Pi running OSMC with one that has SATA headersā¦ but none of the clones-variants have the support and community of the Raspberry.
Right. I meanā¦ for testing/development purposes Iāve been trying to minimize physical integration and limit my install to my bedroom with non-permanent devices (zWave bulbs as opposed to wall switches) but even stillā¦ Iāve broken my system a couple times a realized how truly necessary light and the ability to control it is for a human being to function properly.
By my count there are six options here.
Three are currently available.
One option simply isnāt possible at this time
Your āANDā conditional keeps available options at 3.
My āORā conditional makes five options available.
Whatās the point of making USB-on-a-3 wait on USB-on-a-4 becomes possible when the later has no real bearing on the former?
I didnāt misunderstand. I over-simplified. āORā isnāt the conditional I was looking for.
Also forgot to mention, speed wise unless you have the pi 4 with USB 3.0, the USB 2.0 ports on the pi 3 will transfer about 40megabytes a second or 480mbps, vs half in the micro SD slot, transfers 20-25megabytes a second, so it is only half the speed. Honestly you are right about reliability though. Maybe until booting from USB is officially supported, just get a more expensive micro SD card.
I agree with the thing about the Raspberry Pi community, thatās why I use them vs competitors with more power.