USB Boot on Raspberry Pi 3

brendanheyu · August 13, 2017, 7:35am

Same - I have just gone through the same heartache, then found this thread.

After my second microsd failure I decided to use a usb case with a SSD drive to boot my Pi off and run HA. I etchered raspbian on there after enabling USB booting just to confirm booting from USB was working. No problems.

After etching hass.io onto the same drive, after power on I get no console. The Pi flickers a few lights and then calms down.

Would love to see this working.

frenck · August 13, 2017, 11:59am

+1 Me too… burning down SD cards like there is no tomorrow…

sanyatuning · August 13, 2017, 12:08pm

Hi all!

I can boot hass.io from usb.
I made some changes in cmdline.txt and config.txt files.
There are two of each!
One couple on the resion-boot partition, and another on resin-rootA partition in resin-boot directory

I changed the “root” option in cmdline.txt

root=/dev/sda2

and I added the usb boot line to config.txt, at the end

program_usb_boot_mode=1

One another thing:
I enabled ssh access to resin os, explained here:

heathpitts · August 13, 2017, 12:13pm

I’ve done this before with no luck. Was this after you had a working install on an SD card and then copied it to the USB drive? I have zero issues using USB drives with Raspbian but have never been able to get hass.io to boot even doing exactly as you said above. FWIW, that’s what I had to do after copying my existing HASS SD card to a USB stick.

Edit: let me try again. I’m almost certain I did this on all 4 files but I’ll try again. My next problem is getting my existing config working on hass.io but that’s for another thread lol

IoTmessenger · August 13, 2017, 12:18pm

That is great news, will try as soon as I am near my RPI3 again. Thanks for sharing!

/edit
It is currently ‘Preparing Hass.io’, booted from USB drive with a fresh image and changes made as described above.
I could not get a (backup) image of my current SD card installation to work sadly, so we start over…

Thanks again Sanya, much appreciated!

sanyatuning · August 13, 2017, 2:45pm

I burned a raspbian lite to my SD card, and enable USB boot mode
I burned hassio rpi3 image to my USB stick
try to boot with only USB device -> no boot
boot from SD card with USB stick is plugged in -> rasbian started
I changed the cmdline.txt on SD card and USB stick

boot from SD card with USB stick is plugged in -> resin OS started (but docker has an error)
I used ssh to see logs:

.............$ ssh root@pi -p 22222
root@hassio:~# docker ps
Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

remove SD card and boot again -> resin OS and docker is running
wating

hass.io has an error: disk full

root@hassio:~# journalctl -f
...
Aug 13 12:14:20 hassio dockerd[766]: 2017/08/13 14:14:20 [alert] 27#27: *2 write() to "/var/lib/nginx/logs/access.log" was incomplete: 117 of 215 while logging request, client: ::ffff:192.168.100.114, server: , request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "hassio.local:8123", referrer: "http://hassio.local:8123/"
Aug 13 12:15:02 hassio dockerd[766]: time="2017-08-13T12:15:02.567164650Z" level=error msg="Not continuing with pull after error: failed to register layer: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): write /usr/lib/perl5/core_perl/auto/Encode/JP/JP.so: no space left on device"
...

shutdown with ssh
I used gparted to resize resin-data partition
boot from USB
wating
Home Assistant is now runnning

Jullimullins · August 13, 2017, 8:42pm

I got this also working. Thanks for the advices.

Here is what I did:

flashed hass.io image to usb thumb drive
used gparted to increase the resin-data partion (I added ~1GB more space)
2.1 modified the files like instructed
connected the usb drive to rpi and bootted it up

Some challenges with debug ssh access thou. When trying to connect, I get following error:
Disconnected: No supported authentication methods available (server sent: publickey)

I have created a public key with putty and copied (id_rsa.pub) that to the root of resin-boot partition.

IoTmessenger · August 14, 2017, 5:09pm

Did you add your Private Key to be used by Putty as well? You have to add that in the left pane of putty under SSH - Auth.

Jullimullins · August 14, 2017, 5:22pm

Yes, I did. I will create new pair of keys and try it again.

IoTmessenger · August 14, 2017, 6:02pm

I now see in your post that you copied the key file itself to the resin-boot partition. You have to create a file called ’ authorized_keys’ there and paste the key in it.

drdran · August 14, 2017, 10:52pm

Excuse me but does anyone take a Look to my post Hass.io Features proposal ?

The rebus a script poster to raspberry forum tha may help u

Aangbaeck · August 16, 2017, 6:21am

I have used this method sucessfully with hasbian but with hasio i get the following error

core-ssh:~/Adafruit-Pi-ExternalRoot-Helper# ./adafruit-pi-externalroot-helper -d /dev/sda
Target drive = /dev/sda
[error] Target /dev/sda must be existing device (use -d /dev/foo to specify)

tried sda1 as well but it doesnt seem to work. Anyone having any ideas?

xbmcnut · August 17, 2017, 12:55am

Hi. I tried using gparted to increase resin-data (sda6) and it wouldn’t let me go beyond 1027Mb (from 1024) even though I had >11GB of unused space. Stuck now.

Jullimullins · August 17, 2017, 6:29pm

First you have to resize the main partition and after that you can increase the size of subpartitions. Some cases you have to even change the order of different subparttions but if remember right resin-data partition was the last subparttion. I hope this helps.

Jullimullins · August 17, 2017, 6:33pm

Are you sure that usb is mounted to sda? When I have multiple usb drives hooked to my rpi, every one is mounted to different path, like sdb, sdc, etc. This is just pure guessing…

xbmcnut · August 17, 2017, 11:10pm

Thanks but the other 5 partitions are all tiny so there is not much to steal from in order to make the data partition go from 1GB to say 2GB. I’m doing it with a gparted live USB drive under Windows.

xbmcnut · August 18, 2017, 1:00am

@Jullimullins

Below is the file system of a Hassio image flashed to a 16GB thumb drive. Wondering if you can advise where you stole the space from?

Jullimullins · August 18, 2017, 3:44am

First increase the size /dev/sdb4 and after that you can increase size of /dev/sdb6.

xbmcnut · August 18, 2017, 4:57am

Thanks! Although that made no sense, it worked a treat as I have a 8.6GB data partition. Now to try and boot!

xbmcnut · August 19, 2017, 9:08am

@Jullimullins

Thanks for all your help. Got it working tonight using the following steps for anyone else trying to piece it all together.

Installed Raspbian Lite (2017-04-10) on a MicroSD card and followed the instructions here to enable USB boot mode.
Rebooted Pi then shut down a few minutes later.
Burned hassio Pi3 image to a 16GB USB drive.
Booted PC into Gparted to re-partition hassio image.
Increased /dev/sdb4 from 1GB to around 4GB (must do first otherwise you can’t expand the resin-data partition).
Increased /dev/sdb6 from 1GB to pretty much whatever was left.

With the modified thumb drive back in my PC, I added the following located in the resin-boot drive and also in the resin-rootA partition inside the resin-boot folder:
I changed the “root” option in cmdline.txt to:
root=/dev/sda2
and I added the usb boot line below to config.txt, right at the end:
program_usb_boot_mode=1
I then put the reworked thumb drive back in my Pi3 without the MicroSD card and after about 1 minute, the Home Assistant logo appeared so I knew we were underway. 20 mins later, working Hassio system with no MicroSD card. Yay.