STICKY: USB boot now working on Pi3

[radnor302]

Now it sends me a "B" in morse code (3 short flashes followed by a long from the green led next to the power led)

Isn't that "V", as in Beethoven's 5th symphony? IIRC "B" is dah-di-di-dit.

Yes, Sir! Shows how active I've been.... TNX OM

[HawaiianPi]

Thank you the reply.

Still no joy..... Did every step.

Once I did the FAT32 with bootcode.bin I had the rainbow screen.
Then I added the file timeout (empty file) to the FAT32 partition.

Now it sends me a "B" in morse code (3 short flashes followed by a long from the green led next to the power led)

As I recall, 4 flashes means the kernel is not loading.

What kind of USB drive are you using?

What are you using for a Pi power supply?

[radnor302]

PNY 32G
PS that came with Pi

I deleted timeout and retried. - black screen
reforated FAT32 and copied bootcode.bin, usb - black screen
So, I dont know if it wrote anything to usb.


Putting it down for the evening.

Thanks again

[HawaiianPi]

PS that came with Pi

That is not helpful. Exactly what power supply is it?

• Brand?
• Model?
• Rated power specs?
• Does it have a built-in power cable or require a separate micro USB cable?
• Is there a power switch on the cable?

There are a lot of cheap phone chargers being marketed as Raspberry Pi Power Supplies (phone chargers are not a power supplies).

Model of the PNY 32GB might be helpful as well. PNY makes a ton of different USB flash drives, and some of them are ludicrously slow (like the Attaché series).

[radnor302]

PS vilros adapter 2.5a. No power switch or detachable cable.

Pny is turbo 3.0. Might be attache.

Also tried pny 128g microsd card elite-x in USB adapter

[HawaiianPi]

Boot your Raspberry Pi from the USB mass storage device.
After five to ten seconds, the Raspberry Pi should begin booting and show the rainbow splash screen on an attached display.
Note that if the USB boot bit is set, you do not need to insert an SD card into the Raspberry Pi for USB boot to work.

It would be nice if it was really that simple, but for a lot of people it's not. The Raspberry Pi boot-loader is not compatible with all USB mass storage devices, resulting in problems for some people. Symptoms are either not booting at all, or cold boot works but reboot does not. And people who want to boot from a hard drive can have additional problems due to their power consumption and long spin-up times.

There used to be a USB 3.0 to SATA III adapter cable from a company called ELUTENG that was the Holy Grail of USB booting for the Pi. I tested it on more than a dozen SSD and HDD models from 6 different manufacturers and it worked on every drive I tried (powered only by the Pi's USB port). But alas, that adapter has been replaced by a new model that does not work as well. However, there appears to be an identical product available from TNP on Amazon USA, but not Amazon UK. I tested the TNP with SSD models from Silicon Power and Crucial, and HDD models from Toshiba and Western Digital, and it worked with all of them.

Oh, and the USB boot OTP bit is already set from the factory on the newer 3B+ and 3A+ models.

[radnor302]

Yeah, I'm 1 that cannot get it to boot from usb for anything...

I just recently added an external case and put in it a SSD. No joy

So, I'm giving up on USB boot for my Pi.

[regroers]

Does it work on pi 2?

[HawaiianPi]

Does it work on pi 2?

The later version Pi2B v1.2 has the same SoC as the Pi 3B, so I believe it supports no-SD card USB boot. The earlier version 1.1 would need a FAT32 SD card with the bootcode.bin file on it (you can USB boot any consumer Pi model that way, even the Pi Zero).

[Yeahthisisausername]

$30-ish, 120 GB Kingston A400 SSD works flawlessly on my 3B+. Boots and reboots just fine. Now you know.

[HawaiianPi]

$30-ish, 120 GB Kingston A400 SSD works flawlessly on my 3B+. Boots and reboots just fine. Now you know.

And what USB-SATA adapter are you using?

Because SSD boot problems are almost always the fault of the USB-SATA adapter (now you know).

[WarLion]

Hi guys i got 3 raspberry pi 3b+ a year ago i decide to change my sd-card to a usb drive on my old rpi 3 , everything works fine , but today i decide to make a copy of my pi to another one but with sd-card

after reading and writing with win32Diskimage i place the sd-card on another pi , but i get error

Kernel panic-not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown- block(179,2)

is there a way to clone the usb drive back to sdcard?

i try changing the cmdline.txt but now the pi stuck on unnamed net_device

thanks guys

[HawaiianPi]

is there a way to clone the usb drive back to sdcard?

Use the SD Card Copier utility included with desktop versions of Raspbian (with New Partition UUIDs checked)..

[sushant_ocv]

Hey mate,

Will booting from my external HDD minimize file system corruption issues which right now coming through SD Disk when power is gone?
Please provide your views.

[HawaiianPi]

Hey mate,

Will booting from my external HDD minimize file system corruption issues which right now coming through SD Disk when power is gone?
Please provide your views.

No it will not.

Power loss without a proper software shutdown always has the risk of data loss or corruption with most commonly used operating systems (Raspbian, Windows, Mac OS, etc.). There are some threads about making the Raspbian root file system read-only, which should protect the OS, but that will not protect user data that's being written when power is lost. You could also try Tiny Core Linux, that runs entirely from RAM, which would also protect the OS from corruption, but user data is still at risk.

There is no way to completely protect a system from unscheduled power loss unless no data is ever written.

[jamesking]

Hello. My first post here.

I am hoping I can get some help with USB boot. I wish to boot "Hass.os" from USB. ( https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/ and https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos)

At the moment, I understand this OS will not boot if installed to an SSD for USB mount, but will work when installed on to a MicroSD card for SD card mount.

Can anyone tell me what the requirements are for an image to be USB bootable, so I can request that the Home Assistant Project applies these changes to Hass.Os?

Related feature request on Home Assistant Forums: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/h ... -4b/123462


Thank you,

James

[HelenMcCall]

Hello. Looks like I'm the first to ask this question:

Will the USB boot work on the new model 4B?

Helen

[davidcoton]

Hello. Looks like I'm the first to ask this question:

Will the USB boot work on the new model 4B?

Helen

Sorry to dissappoint, but you are not. Probably not even in the first hundred, it's much asked in the Pi4 threads (actually OT for this thread).

Short answer: Not now, will soon, when it's ready.

[DougieLawson]

Hello. Looks like I'm the first to ask this question:

Will the USB boot work on the new model 4B?

Helen

You're only about TWELVE days late asking that.
USB boot isn't in the early factory shipped firmware, it will be enabled later with a bootloader eeprom update.

[eldaty]

Please rea

By default this is SD card boot followed by USBaudacity temp mail origin device boot. Subsequently, the boot ROM checks to see if program_gpio_bootmode OTP bit is set, if it is then it reads either GPIOs 22-26 or 39-43 (depending on the value of program_gpio_bootpos) and uses those bits to disable boot modes. This means it is possible to use a hardware switch to switch between different boot modes if there are more than one available.

If there is no SD card inserted the SD boot mode takes five seconds to fail. To reduce this and fall back to USB more quickly, you can either insert an SD card with nothing on it or use the program_gpio_bootmode OTP to only enable USB.

So you can control which boot devices to check via GPIOs, or only enable certain modes in the OTP in the first place.
I don't know whether just having USB mass storage enabled is faster than, but at least it would avoid some of the timeouts.

Woah. That is the most awesome thing ive seen all day. Would this work with a pi 2

[rpdom]

Woah. That is the most awesome thing ive seen all day. Would this work with a pi 2

I think it is possible on the newer Pi 2Bs that use the updated SoC, but not the original Pi 2B models.

[Lewis-H]

Hi, I tried your method on my windows 10 laptop but was unsucessful. My Pi3 was not detect on my laptop. Is this a issue with laptop, Pi3 or connecting wires?

Regards,
Lewis

[melaniestaines]

Good to know about this info...i will try it this weekend...

[patientx]

We were able to use usb booting with Ubuntu Mate last year on my friends rpi3 (not plus), but it doesn't clearly say whether the new 19.10.1 works with usb booting. I am trying determine whether it works with USB booting somehow because he doesn't have any sd cards available right now and wants to use usb drive if possible.

TL,DR : Does Ubuntu 19.10.1 (https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi) work with usb booting -somehow- if used with raspberry pi 3 ?