Half a year ago, Linux crashed on my Intel NUC mini computer and because I wanted to get back into podcasting with Ultraschall, I ended up putting Windows 10 on that machine.
So now I had no Linux box at all, and I was missing it. I picked up a Raspberry Pi, which turned out to be a brilliant purchase. We were in the thick of homeschooling with not enough computers to go around, and since my kids were using Chromebooks at school, I had the Raspberry running one SD card with Chromium and another with Raspbian Buster. So far so good.
The SD card is the Achilles heel of the Raspberry Pi: it’s slow and not particularly reliable. I’d been looking for a more stable solution for ages. Berryboot was a step in the right direction, but you still needed an SD card to then boot the OS from a USB stick or SSD.
Now there’s a proper solution, which I recently spotted here. If you’ve got a Raspberry Pi 4, you can combine this with upgrading to the 64-bit version of Raspberry OS. Even better.
Here’s how:
Download the beta version of Raspberry OS 64-bit.
Flash it onto a USB stick using Raspberry Pi Imager.
Boot your system one last time from the SD card and open a terminal window.
To enable USB boot, you need to update the EEPROM firmware:
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade Reboot
Then open the terminal again:
sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update
Change “critical” to “stable” and save.
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable/pieeprom-2020-06-15.bin
and then
Reboot
Now you can pull out the SD card, plug in your USB stick or SSD, and the system boots right up.
It worked a treat for me — the system runs even smoother, and I reckon a USB stick is much easier to clone too.
First published in German at reinergaertner.de, where I’ve been at it since 1997. AI did the heavy lifting on the translation. I did the heavy squinting at the result.