Issue with SSD boot

[moryoav]

I have the Argon One M.2 case with the SSD, which is basically a SATA SSD drive connected to the USB. I initially started working with PiFi on the SD card and that worked fine, but I wanted to explore the option of booting from the SSD (and having PiFi run on the SSD only). I’ve done it before with orher OSs, so it should be possible.

I flashed standard raspbian with GUI on the SD card first, then from the UI that loaded I flashed PiFi (Pi4 with 8GB RAM).

It then won’t boot. This is what I got:

I then applied the tweak suggested in this post:

Flashing and using generic USB for PiFi install

Ok so it’s a little bit experimental and not fully tested so can’t verify if everything works But, after flashing the image to your USB, open the USB drive in Windows Explorer/Finder and replace the contents of cmdline.txt with: console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=squashfs,ext4 rootwait When I do that to point to the USB rather than SD it seems to boot and you can see PiFi 5 Setup in WiFi Settings Again, this approach is not fully tested. But it does seem to boot so…

And now I get another error:

So maybe a different tweak is needed?
I also tried to flash, instead of the Pi4 firmware, the generic firmware from the documentation (the Google Drive link), that failed in a different way, got into a boot loop.

Any suggestion on what to try?
From my experience, having the OS run on the SSD has lots of benefits, from extra speed to reliability of the system.

Thanks!

[pifi]

Hi,

I found some things on Raspberry Pi forums (here and here) that may prove useful on this issue. I’d copy the line below rather than the one suggested in the forum.

Can you try cmdline.txt as
usb-storage.quirks=174c:1156:u console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=squashfs,ext4 rootwait

If that doesn’t work can you try a USB 2.0 port on the Pi rather than USB 3.0 and see if same issue persists?

[moryoav]

First, on the Argon SSD case you can’t switch to the USB 2.0, it’s connected to the USB 3.0 in a way that cannot be changed.
However, I made some progress. It was stupid really, I spent so much time on it that I didn’t try the obvious. For some reason adding that line to the cmdline.txt and restarting doesn’t work, but turning off the power completely and turning it back on did work (with the this text in the file: console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=squashfs,ext4 rootwait)

Now I have a different issue, hopefully smaller one. Now that I’m booting from the SSD and running the OS from it, how do I expand the partition to fill up the entire space? I now seem to have 2 partitions - sda1 that’s 64MB and sda2 that’s 1GB in size. Can I expand sda2?

I guess I could boot again from the Raspberry Pi OS and do that with diskpart, but if there’s a way to do that from PiFi that seems best, don’t want to break something again…

Thanks!

[moryoav]

[moryoav]

I was a little impatient, decided not to wait, booted from the Raspberry Pi OS and with gparted created an sda3 partition (decided not to touch the existing ones, just in case). And from 192.168.3.14 I then added another mount point and a network share, and everything is working now… It should have created it on first boot, no? I guess it’s an issue related to booting from the USB for the first time.

[pifi]

Yes, it looks like it’s specific to USB — on the next firmware release I’ll look at more options for the images and potentially add a choice of file system (ext4/squashfs) and one that’s optimised specifically for USB

[moryoav]

Great. Thanks. Right now I formatted it as ext4, would you recommend something else?
So my issue now seems to be that I have a lot of storage and I’m not sure what to do with it… Ideas are welcome…