USB Boot on Raspberry Pi 3

It was never ‘required’ with the old hassos

Hi David,

That is great news, So I can just flash the Image onto a USB drive and HASS.io will Boot?

Cheers Rob.

Perhaps you’re misunderstanding. USB boot is not ‘required’
HassOS will not boot from a USB drive - you must use an SD-Card.
The old ResinOS you COULD set to boot from USB but it was never a ‘requirement’

Thanks for clearing that up!

I much prefer USB boot myself.

So do I but no dev is even commenting about USB boot. That’s why I am still running ResinOS myself.

Can only find HassOS now so this guide is no good. Does anyone have the link or can paste a download to ResinOS ?

Currently downloading this Pi3 32bit version from Mar

Can confirm that I have finally got this working. Restore from snapshots restored all of the config but I was having access with external links from the Rpi out to the network even though I could connect into it remotely. Tracked it down to a connection setting that I needed to change to work from ethernet -

With the USB drive in the PC I could access Resin Boot and this file system-connections/resin-sample I deleted the wifi config (which was blank) and added the following to work off my system (change yours as needed)

[connection]
id=my-ethernet
type=ethernet
interface-name=eth0
permissions=
secondaries=

[ethernet]
mac-address-blacklist=

[ipv4]
address1=192.168.0.60/24,192.168.0.1
dns=8.8.8.8;8.8.4.4;
dns-search=
method=manual

[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
dns-search=
method=auto

I’m not getting the same structure as you!
What to do?

That is the new HassOS build - you need to download the ResinOS version that I have linked above.

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This version will work with Raspberry 3 B+ ?

No. Only the newer HassOS but there is no known USB boot option for this new OS.

Which USB drives are you guys using?

I have now tried with

Kingston G2, 32 GB - Not working, it is never booting
Kingston G4, 32 GB - Is working, booting from USB but for some reason it is so slow it cannot create more than 3 docker containers and only start 2 of them.
Sandisk Cruzer Blade, 32 GB, won’t boot

So some successfully tried drives would be nice to hear about.

Thanks

I use that one and I set it up a few times now and never had a problem with it. I think you’re missing a step/steps. It works. However, ResinOS is not the future and you’d be much better served biting the bullet and going HassOS now on an SD-Card.

Well, that’s wierd!
Since the one flash drive is working I know that my RPi can work, and have enabled USB boot.

I have tried flashing org. Raspbian image with both Etcher and Win32disk. I have tried making af copy of the working, slow, USB with win32disk.
And yesterday I tried manually with parted to create the partitions and copy the SD card to the flash drive. Non of above result in booting from the Sandisk. The yellow led on RPi won’t even flash.

I might try changing the usb timeout tonight.

Ok so I got a USB boot working for Hass.io - not on ResinOS or HassOS but Raspbian (which at least will be updated unlink ResinOS)

I have a Pi3B (not a 3B plus)

I installed the latest Raspbian Stretch image on a USB and booted from it and then I used Dale3h’s script which installs Docker and then installs the Hassio container and the Supervisor container. I restored my snapshot and it was all working except for a couple of things I needed to do.

  1. change the ssh port from 22 to something else. You will still be able to use port 22 to ssh into the host.
  2. I needed to uninstall and reinstall the configurator addon - I’m using the one in Daniels own repo as it is kept better up-to-date than the official repo.
  3. I needed to uninstall and reinstall Daniel Welsh’s Dropbox backup addon. Neither configurator or dropbox would start till I did that!

Dale3h’s script can be found here:

If you login on port 22 (to the host) you will find all the config files at /usr/share/hassio/homeassistant
If you login on ssh port in addon, you will find everything in the ‘right’ place anyway.

I haven’t timed it but I think it’s a fair bit faster.

I am also noticing a database error so I’m going to delete the database and restart.

Note this is NOT running HassOS or ResinOS it’s running Raspbian and Hass.io

EDIT: I just deleted the database and restarted. It took less than a minute!
Also I’m currently running 0.76.0b3 with the new auth and also legacy_api and lovelace.

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Does that give you one single drive when you plug it back into your PC? When I was running Hassbian I had two usb drives that were imaged. Every month I would swap over drives. If I had a problem I could reload the latest image file and be back up quickly.

Thanks for updating me on this.

Yes it’s only one single USB stick. No SD-card at all.

Oh sorry just reread the question.

It’s just running Raspbian so you can put back in PC and make an image easily. It does have 2 partitions - fat16 boot and an ext4 for Raspbian.

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Will give this a go. Cheers

Hi guys I’m also interested in this matter I’ve a Pi 3B+ and I’d like to boot from a usb disk.
Is it possible what shall I do? Is there any tutorial?

https://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-3-With-Bootable-SSD-Drive/

It worked – BUT – not with the regular image for the SD card usualy named “hassos_rpi3-1.12.img” but with another type of image with the name “OLD-resinos-hassio-1.3-raspberrypi3.img” that can be found here.. I don’t know why is that (or why it has OLD in the name).
Burning the first image and having a look at the partition table, it was a mess, not like in the picture above and of course didn’t worked, but burning the “OLD” image the partition looked exactly like the picture above, did the resize, and 5 min later HASSIO was installing on my 16G external usb stick (pi 3B).
Tip.
Also only after I format via diskpart in win 10… formatting in osx or linux was a bust (maybe I am bad at formatting tho :))
Tip.2
Resizing sdb6 (the partition inside sdb4) must be done so that the space at the front (aka left side in the UI) remain the same (mine was 4 megs), or it will not boot.