Last week my two shakes died due to SD corruption and /or power outage (so double fried) . I have several other PI’s at home but those are all changed to usb booting as these are more durable for larger writing cycles in my situation.
In 2019 in this forum this question also came up (Booting from USB) with the reply that this was something “work in progress”.
I’m wondering if this already possible (either in beta or otherwise) ?
If not then I’m facing the odd situation that I have to purchase 2 new Pi’s and SD’s although I have 10 unused Pi’s lying around…
the USB functionality is coming in version 0.20, out before the end of the year.
regarding the 10 unused Pi’s sitting around, is there something preventing you from returning them to their original “boot from SD card” configuration?
Hi Ivor / Richard,
I’ve used the bitflip trick to enable USB boot on the Pi-3’s and as far as I understood this was a one-way change which could not be reverted. I interpreted that as once you go USB you can’t go back to SD and I have never checked this to see if these pi’s still have a sd bootability next to the USB boot.
I did this too with my 3B and I’ve not had a problem booting from SD and USB afterward. If there’s an SD but no USB it seems to boot just fine from SD.
the new solution to utilize a USB flash drive is not to simply move all files from the SD card to the USB flash drive. rather, this future functionality will still boot from the SD card, but when a USB flash drive is detected, most data writes will be redirected over to the USB, while the OS will continue to operate off of the SD card. i.e., the new functionality would not have helped solve your problem anyway.
please report back on your experience trying to boot from SD when there is no USB flash drive. something else i thought of you could try is to “flash” the Shake image to the USB flash drive and see what happens when you boot the Pi with no SD card present.
At this point I have actually both original shakes up and running via the recently purchased sd cards. After some fiddling with the prints and replacing the chargers and install the shake-os via the “copy/paste” setup they are working and reporting to shakenet. So i kept the original station names
This weekend I’ll change the configs to my needs (ntp config / logon behavior and backups).
In regards to your comment :
the “new solution” you describe I’ve used that before : in a domoticz setup where the os booted from SD and data / backups were stored on a flashdrive. This worked technically but I noticed quite some lagging in the operation of the domoticz environment. Perhaps this is less where the speeds of the SD and flashdrive are more the same. SD corruption did occur anyway.
Once I moved it completely to the flashdrive the behavior was more consistent but somewhat slower (which could be caused by the type of flashdrive).
Last weekend I first tried the "copy / paste " install to the flash drives but that fails due to the direct calling of the mmcblk0 instead of sdx.
So technically at this moment my issue is solved but needs (my) fine tuning and I’ll test to see what happens with usb only based on the .img file and the raspberry shake, I’ll keep this thread posted. I’m working abroad so bare with me to this weekend.
