USB Boot

[nicnic2001]

Hey,

I was wondering if there was a way to boot from a USB Stick without needing the SD Card for the boot partition! If this can be done then please tell me and if not then how can I do it so it only stores boot parameters like config.txt on the SD Card but it boots the actual OS from the USB?

Thanks for your help!

Nick

[kusti8]

You will always need the SD card because that is where the GPU looks, but if you install BerryBoot (not sure if you can do it on NOOBS) then you can install the most common OS onto a USB stick and if you need a specific OS that is not in the list, you just need to convert it to squashfs.

[Lob0426]

You will always need an SD card. You can use an old SD card that is 32MB, or less to keep boot files on. I think there is only 19MB in my current boot partition.

There are a bunch of forum posts on how to boot to USB devices. You transfer all of the system files to your USB stick. You edit cmdline.txt to point to your USB device.

Here is older instruction how to do it. You do not need 64MB.
by dom » Jul 21st, '12, 04:15
Use dd or winimage to write the image to the USB stick rather than the sdcard.
Format the sdcard as FAT and copy the files from the FAT partition of the USB stick onto the sdcard (only needs to be about 64M in size).

Change cmdline.txt on sdcard from root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 to root=/dev/sda2
Richard