USB drive with Raspberry PI

Here are detailed steps to get a Raspberry PI running entirely off a USB drive (after booting from its SD card).

Some sources:

Detailed log:

  • Start with 4 GB SD card

  • Copy 2013-07-26-wheezy-raspbian.img onto it:

    sudo dd if=path/2013-07-26-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M

  • Partition USB drive:

    • Partition 1: system root: 16 GB

    • Partition 2: Swap: 1 GB

    • Partition 3: /usr/local: rest of drive

  • Format the partitions too (ext4)
    • sudo mkfs.ext3 -q -m 0 -L ROOT /dev/sdb1

    • sudo mkswap -q -L SWAP120 /dev/sdb2

    • sudo mkfs.ext3 -q -m 0 -L LOCAL /dev/sdb3

  • Boot off 4 GB SD card

  • ssh to its IP address (get from router or whatever):

    ssh pi@[IP ADDRESS]
    password: raspberry
    
  • Copy current root partition to USB drive (see blog post mentioned above to make sure you’re using the right partitions):

    sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p2 of=/dev/sda1 bs=4M
    
  • Resize:

    sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sda1
    sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1
    
  • See what UUID it got:

    $ sudo blkid /dev/sda1
    /dev/sda1: UUID="9c7e2035-df9b-490b-977b-d60f2170889d" TYPE="ext4"
    
  • Mount:

    sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
    
  • Edit config files and change current root partition to the new root UUID in fstab, and /dev/sda1 in cmdline.txt (cmdline.txt doesn’t support UUID, darn)

    • vi /mnt/etc/fstab:

      UUID=9c7e2035-df9b-490b-977b-d60f2170889d    /   ext4    defaults,noatime,async  0       1
      
  • Umount /mnt:

    sudo umount /mnt
    
  • Reboot and check things out

Swap:

  • Format swap partition:

        $ sudo mkswap -L swappart /dev/sda2
        Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1048572 KiB
    LABEL=swappart, UUID=a471af01-938b-4ad0-8653-dafe211cdfba
    
  • Make sure it’ll work:

    sudo swapon -U a471af01-938b-4ad0-8653-dafe211cdfba
    free -h
    
  • Edit /etc/fstab, add at end:

    UUID=a471af01-938b-4ad0-8653-dafe211cdfba swap swap defaults 0 0
    
  • Remove the default 100M swap file:

    sudo apt-get purge dphys-swapfile
    
  • reboot and check swap space again, should be 1 G (not 1.1 G)

Now move /usr/local to the USB drive:

  • Format partition:

    sudo mkfs.ext4 -L usr.local /dev/sda3
    
  • Find out its UUID:

    $ blkid /dev/sda3
    /dev/sda3: LABEL="usr.local" UUID="3c6e0024-d0e4-412e-a4ab-35d7c9027070" TYPE="ext4"
    
  • Mount it temporarily on /mnt:

    sudo mount UUID="3c6e0024-d0e4-412e-a4ab-35d7c9027070" /mnt
    
  • Copy the current /usr/local over there:

    (cd /usr/local;sudo tar cf - .) | ( cd /mnt;sudo tar xf -)
    
  • Umount:

    sudo umount /mnt
    
  • Remove files from /usr/local:

    sudo rm -rf /usr/local/*
    
  • Edit /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sda3 on /usr/local at boot:

    UUID=3c6e0024-d0e4-412e-a4ab-35d7c9027070       /usr/local      ext4    defaults,noatime        0       1
    
  • See if that works:

    sudo mount -a
    df -h
    
  • reboot and make sure it works again