I was just reading the notes on BrewBox.com regarding switching from the MicroSD cards to booting from an external, USB SATA drive. Seems appealing to me, as I’ve had these SD cards fail before. The hardware seems pretty straightforward, but the linked documentation only talks about doing it from a new RPi image, and requires you to use a GUI utility in the RPi desktop to copy the image from the SD card to the USB drive. Can I “uninstall” the desktop/UI stuff afterwards? Or I guess I can disable the desktop stuff with raspi-config. I’ll have 240GB of storage, so I guess having the desktop stuff on there won’t impact me much, if at all.
What other considerations are necessary to make this seamless as possible. I assume I can just do a full backup prior, and restore after I get a fresh copy of docker and BrewBlox installed. I assume my IP address won’t change, as it’s tagged in my router. All the spark and block config should come back from the backup, right?
The simplest way to go about this is to treat it as a fresh install.
- make a snapshot of your brewblox system
- copy the snapshot to your normal computer
- install RPI imager on your normal computer
- using RPI imager, flash your SD card with the firmware image that enables USB boot (it’s under utility tools)
- load that SD card in your Pi and connect power
- wait a few minutes for firmware to update
- disconnect power and unload the card
- follow normal brewblox install instructions, but now using a USB drive instead of an SD card.
- load your exported snapshot during or after installation.
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I still think the installation instructions could be a bit clearer or re-written, entirely in the BrewBlox site (without a link to an article talking about the Desktop version of the Pi OS).
I tried following your steps above - but it was not clear to me that the OS was going to be copied onto the USB drive. I did the USB firmware. Then I flashed the SD card with the 32 bit Lite version and booted it up. Finished loading. Logged in. Shutdown the Pi, removed the SD card - and no dice. It wasn’t copied over to the USB drive.
Instead, you should tell people to plug the Pi into their hardwired ethernet and do a “net install” - with no SD card in there (after doing the boot from USB step). I was able to install the Lite 32 bit OS over the network, and then the BrewPi install on top of that.