Booting a Raspberry Pi from USB (was: Re: Is it a brick?)

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 at 11:43, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> The Pi4 comes with an EEPROM that allows direct booting from USB, but
> you need to manually configure it first using the rpi-eeprom tool (not
> sure why they picked that it defaults to SD-only boot, the EEPROM is
> actually capable of probing USB by default and falling back to SD if
> there is no USB2/3 disk attached ... perhaps because it makes the boot
> half a second slower or some such ...)

Either that, or it risks confusing kids who forget to unplug a USB key
before turning it on or something...?

Yes, the Pi 4 is well on its way to being a capable little computer,
rather than a toy.

I find it quite inspiring and refreshing to see someone really willing
to pare a specification to the bare bones, in a way like Sinclair
Research used to do in the 1980s. Although the model names and some
other things (like RISC OS and BBC BASIC) show that the RasPi sees its
inspiration as being Acorn Computer, not Sinclair.

> BTW, if you do not like the ads i found rpi-imager to be the far better
> GUI for dd compared to balena etcher (just pick "local image" in the
> list and it lets you select a random img file for writing)

Good tip! I forgot about that.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ ← versions for Windows, Linux and macOS


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