2020-08-06, 05:20 PM
I'll have to break out one of my old 3B+ PIs and try it. I was never able to get OP1 to boot from USB. Again, the base distribution of OP2 will not boot from USB, you'd have to make sure that it has been installed and completely updated via apt before you try. So, the steps I would take (YMMV):
- Download the OP 2 Image
- Install on SD card
- Get running
- update via "sudo apt update -y && sudo apt full-upgrade"
- make sure the firmware is updated via "sudo rpi-update"
- remove your SD card and plug into another computer, attach you SSD and copy the entire SD card to the SSD using the "dd" command (this is Linux, not sure what you'd do on Windows)
- use gparted to expand the root partition to the remaining size of the SSD
- plug the SSD into your PI and see if it boots.
If you have a generic Raspibian distribution on another SD card, and a USB SD card adapter, you can do all this using the PI itself, but you shouldn't try to copy the active SD card to an attached drive.
One thing... you can make your boot SD partition read-only, and only use your SD card for the boot partition. You'll need to make changes in /boot/cmdline.txt and /etc/fstab to point to the PARTID of your SSD drive root partition, so you are using your SD card for /boot and your SSD for everything else. It should give you some protection from SD card corruption, and it actually gives you a little faster boot. Of course, when you need to make updates to /boot, you'll need to make it writable again. This is something you can do from raspi-config.
- Download the OP 2 Image
- Install on SD card
- Get running
- update via "sudo apt update -y && sudo apt full-upgrade"
- make sure the firmware is updated via "sudo rpi-update"
- remove your SD card and plug into another computer, attach you SSD and copy the entire SD card to the SSD using the "dd" command (this is Linux, not sure what you'd do on Windows)
- use gparted to expand the root partition to the remaining size of the SSD
- plug the SSD into your PI and see if it boots.
If you have a generic Raspibian distribution on another SD card, and a USB SD card adapter, you can do all this using the PI itself, but you shouldn't try to copy the active SD card to an attached drive.
One thing... you can make your boot SD partition read-only, and only use your SD card for the boot partition. You'll need to make changes in /boot/cmdline.txt and /etc/fstab to point to the PARTID of your SSD drive root partition, so you are using your SD card for /boot and your SSD for everything else. It should give you some protection from SD card corruption, and it actually gives you a little faster boot. Of course, when you need to make updates to /boot, you'll need to make it writable again. This is something you can do from raspi-config.