An early birthday present to my self – 4Gb Raspberry Pi 4B. With a case and a fan and a 3A power supply. Also – a vendor supplied 16Gb SD card preinstalled with latest raspbian. and lastly – an external USB 3.0 SSD housing.
What could possibly go wrong?
Reading the documents – it should be easy to boot from the latest version of RaspberryOS (aka Raspbian). Just download the image, un-tar, burn it to the disk, plug the disk in and boot.
Well – erm – nope.
First was the fun and games with the supplied SD card. You would think the vendor would supply an adequate, fit for purpose, unit? Nope. They must have found the nastiest, cheapest, slowest PoS they could. Booting it took for ever. Once booted – I ran the diagnostics because there is no way this can be slower than a 3b right?
Diagnostics are giving almost 50 IOPS! Wow – that fast. NOT. The limit is set at something like 400. Doubtless to say the card was not fit for purpose. But thats ok right – I plan to burn to SSD and boot from that anyways. Using the pi to do this was not the most pleasurable process. It took literally hours.
In the end (and 3 nights later) – I quit with it. I got an old card that I knew worked, flashed the latest image, booted and bang – it was there. Amazing. Even just running from the card was fast. 4Gb really makes a big difference. Chrome would run without killing the entire OS.
Next step – start again with the SSD. Burned the image – booted – nothing.
Waited – nothing.
Tried again – same thing.
Strange.
One thing I found was that it kinda worked if it went through USB 2 rather than 3. Ok – this pointed me to something else…
https://jamesachambers.com/new-raspberry-pi-4-bootloader-usb-network-boot-guide/
The need to update the firmware on the USB/SATA. Did that. Booted – almost same thing. Note – almost – when doing this sort of stuff – keep an extra eye out for things that are slightly different – it’s important.
I would love to provide the link but I’ve managed to loose that one.
Googled again – Now we find out that there is something called UAS. And it’s important. Because on some cheap units – it’s not implemented entirely cleanly. This resulted in finding out way more about the boot process than I ever really wanted to know and also editing a file in the boot directory to add an exclusion for that protocol. Downside is that it would slow my disc down a bit but it would still be way faster than SD.
So I did that.
And guess what?
It worked!
Finally, after a long time and much trying but not giving up. Nice new PiOS on a 128Gb SSD.
Well impressed.
Lessons gained:
- Don’t give up
- Look at the small differences – they may give you a clue.
- Try different ports
- Google and read what you google. Don’t skip the detail.
Update…
These are useful resource links:
Jeef Geerling – pi 4 booting from SSD
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspberry-pi-4-usb-ssd
PI4 USB boot Ubuntu:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=131&t=278791
Update firmware for JMS578:
https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/software/jms578_fw_update
How to improve speeds for PI4 USB
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931
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