Ubuntu Server on HDD

[Matt Penfold]

It is great to see an official ARM64 Ubuntu Server release.

I have no problems getting it working using an SD card, but it fails when I install the image to an HDD (It tries to boot from an SD card, and of course, there isn't one!). Does anyone have some pointers as to how I can get it booting from the HDD? I suspect I will need to edit some files after I have written the image to the hard drive.

[Andyroo]

Is your Pi capable of booting from a HDD?

To get it up and running you could try creating an SD card (FAT32 format) just with bootcode.bin only on it and boot from that with the HDD connected.

That may be easier than swapping the HDD between machines to edit files

[Matt Penfold]

Is your Pi capable of booting from a HDD?

To get it up and running you could try creating an SD card (FAT32 format) just with bootcode.bin only on it and boot from that with the HDD connected.

That may be easier than swapping the HDD between machines to edit files

Yes, it will boot from the HDD if I put a Raspbian on the drive. Good thinking on using a minimal SD card!

[Icosagon]

Hey Matt Penfold

Is your HDD connected to Pi via USB?. If it is you can't boot unless you enable usb booting on it.
Did you properly flash Ubuntu to HDD ? Try setting the boot bit
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... des/msd.md

[Matt Penfold]

Hey Matt Penfold

Is your HDD connected to Pi via USB?. If it is you can't boot unless you enable usb booting on it.
Did you properly flash Ubuntu to HDD ? Try setting the boot bit
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... des/msd.md

Yes, the boot bit is set, and I have had the PI booting Raspbian from the HDD, but now I am trying the official Ubuntu server image and it is not working. Almost certainly because there is something wrong with the config files. I am just not sure what!

[Andyroo]

Looking at the images https://www.ubuntu.com/download/iot/raspberry-pi-2-3 it only mentions 2 and 3 - no 3B+

Firmware and drivers changed at 3B+ so could that be the reason?

[Matt Penfold]

Looking at the images https://www.ubuntu.com/download/iot/raspberry-pi-2-3 it only mentions 2 and 3 - no 3B+

Firmware and drivers changed at 3B+ so could that be the reason?

It is just a Pi3B, not a plus model.

I have found some instructions here (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/RaspberryPi ... .2FAArch64) which I am in the process of testing. First though I need to setup a virtual Linux box.

[HawaiianPi]

It looks like cmdline.txt needs to be edited to point to the USB drive (/etc/fstab seems to be using labels, so that's probably okay).

Code: Select all

net.ifnames=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

Change the root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 statement to point to the second partition of the USB drive, preferably using something more robust than /dev/sda2.

[Matt Penfold]

It looks like cmdline.txt needs to be edited to point to the USB drive (/etc/fstab seems to be using labels, so that's probably okay).

Code: Select all

net.ifnames=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

Change the root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 statement to point to the second partition of the USB drive, preferably using something more robust than /dev/sda2.

Thanks, that is one of the places I was going wrong. I now Ubuntu server booting from the HDD with no SD card required. The instructions to do it are in that article I linked to, but a bit all over the place. I might write up a simplified version.