Running a Pi from an External USB HDD

I've just found a really simple way to move your Raspberry Pi operating system from the SD card to an external USB drive which is worthy of sharing.

It is done via a shell script by Adafruit which is cloned from Github to your Pi, which automatically;

  • creates and formats the partition on your USB HDD
  • copies across your operating system (root) from your SD card to the drive
  • amends your cmdline.txt & fstab.

It does all that from one command, and having used it twice now, it's very painless!

See https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Pi-ExternalRoot-Helper 

There is also a in-depth guide to accompany the script if you need it, but the git readme in most cases will be all you need.

Paul

Bill Thomson's picture

Re: Running a Pi from an External USB HDD

Nice find! Thanks for sharing.

Gzero's picture

Re: Running a Pi from an External USB HDD

Hello Im trying to run emoncms in the raspberri pi 2 and storing all the data into an usb HD drive, do you know this is possible by using this script?

Paul Reed's picture

Re: Running a Pi from an External USB HDD

The script is now included as standard within v9, so if you follow the emoncms installation guide it will guide you through it.

Paul

sheppy's picture

Re: Running a Pi from an External USB HDD

is there any point in moving everything from a wear levelling SD card to an early SSD? I'm guessing it's the same type of flash memory with the same number of write cycles?

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