Boot from external hard drive

[TeddyIP]

I'm Sorry if this is the wrong area to post such thread. I have copied my SD card to a 1 tb hard drive, now I want to be able to boot from hard drive and not the SD card. I first attempted to remove the SD card from the PI 3 and tried to re boot the system and as I expected I hadn't completed the setup.

Can I boot Raspberry pi 3 strictly from an external hard drive?

Code: Select all

  pi@raspberry:~ $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        13G  4.6G  7.7G  38% /
devtmpfs        458M     0  458M   0% /dev
tmpfs           462M     0  462M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           462M   13M  450M   3% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           462M     0  462M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p6   68M   22M   46M  33% /boot
tmpfs            93M     0   93M   0% /run/user/1000
/dev/sda7       915G  4.6G  864G   1% /media/pi/root0
/dev/sda6        69M   23M   47M  33% /media/pi/boot
/dev/sda5        30M  3.1M   25M  11% /media/pi/SETTINGS
/dev/mmcblk0p5   30M  2.7M   26M  10% /media/pi/SETTINGS1
pi@raspberry:~ $ 
   

[fruitoftheloom]

I'm Sorry if this is the wrong area to post such thread. I have copied my SD card to a 1 tb hard drive, now I want to be able to boot from hard drive and not the SD card. I first attempted to remove the SD card from the PI 3 and tried to re boot the system and as I expected I hadn't completed the setup.

Can I boot Raspberry pi 3 strictly from an external hard drive?

Code: Select all

  pi@raspberry:~ $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        13G  4.6G  7.7G  38% /
devtmpfs        458M     0  458M   0% /dev
tmpfs           462M     0  462M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           462M   13M  450M   3% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           462M     0  462M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p6   68M   22M   46M  33% /boot
tmpfs            93M     0   93M   0% /run/user/1000
/dev/sda7       915G  4.6G  864G   1% /media/pi/root0
/dev/sda6        69M   23M   47M  33% /media/pi/boot
/dev/sda5        30M  3.1M   25M  11% /media/pi/SETTINGS
/dev/mmcblk0p5   30M  2.7M   26M  10% /media/pi/SETTINGS1
pi@raspberry:~ $ 
   

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... des/msd.md

[k-pi]

Yep, as above, set the OTB, remove your microSDHC card, reboot & it should boot up.

Both of my RPi3B have the OTB set, & I can still boot from a microSD card if I want to, but prefer to use pendrives & USB HDD/SSD, as I do with my RPi3B+.

[TeddyIP]

Thanks you for your advice. I still can't get it to work atm, I will try again tomorrow after I finish work.

[k-pi]

Plug in your microSD card & boot from it, then set the OTB, check that it was set successfully - then shutdown, remove the microSD card, plug in your USB drive, & it should then boot up.

(You may find that the RPi doesn't supply enough power for your drive, in which case you will have to power it by other means.)