I flash Volumio-3.701 to 32GB USB thumb drive, modify Pi 5 boot order to 0xf614 ( 4 = usb as first boot order ).
My purpose is to put Batocera microSD card in Pi5 slot, when I plug the Volumio USB thumb drive, Pi 5 will boot and run Volumio, while I unplug the volumio USB drive and boot Pi 5, it will run Batocera from microSD slot. So I don’t need to switch the microSD card ( my Case is difficult to get the microSD slot ).
Unfortunately, if I keep the microSD card ( Batocera ) in Pi 5 slot, the Volumio USB thumb drive will not boot, it will hang there. If I remove the microSD card from Pi 5, the Volumio USB thumb drive boot successful and works normal.
Batocera microSD card boot normal if no USB thumb drive plugin.
Is it necessary to remove microSD card if you want to boot from USB ? or you can boot USB while microSD ( Batocera ) card still in the Pi 5 slot ? if yes, is there something wrong ? ( USB need to set delay time…etc )
@nerd Thank you for the reply. My eeprom firmware is 2024/05/17, it shows Bootloader up-to-date.
I also tried
USB_MSD_PWR_OFF_TIME=0 USB_MSD_STARTUP_DELAY=8000
but the same result.
I will dissamble my Pi5 from the Amoled 5.5 case and connect the HDMI to normal TV to see what the TEXT shows while boot
( it cannot see in the amoled 5.5 screen ).
I wonder if it is possible to boot USB while microSD card still in the slot ? has anyone succeed ? or it is necessary to remove the microSD card to boot USB ?
Hi @nerd
I jsut test on Pi 4 to check the screen TEXT
If I keep microSD in slot and boot USB, the screen shows
Player preparing startup
waiting for USB devices. this should not take long.
then it seems take a long time ( I wait for 3 min and quit )
If I remove the microSD, just boot USB, the screen shows
Player preparing startup
waiting for USB devices. this should not take long.
Finishinf storage preparations.
Version “3.703” prepared. Please wait for startup to finish.
and it takes below 30 second,
then the USB boot succesful into Volumio.
When you have MicroSD inserted - what OS is loaded to it?
The reason I asked is that by design the MicroSD for Volumio OS is a recovery option. Even if you try to boot Volumio OS from USB with Volumio OS present on MicroSD, the init part will not allow to fully boot, only to the diagnostic init level.
Please make sure you do not have the exact same Volumio version on both SD and USB.
Otherwise the partition identifiers (UUIDs) are the same for both of them.
Each new Volumio version will have a different set of UUIDs. If they are the same on both devices, the boot process is unable to locate the correct device. It will just pick the one which is returned when using the UUID, it is undefined whether that is from the USB or SD. So it might be booting from USB initially and then continue with the partitions on the SD (or the other way around). There is no guarantee for a correct start.
Thanks @nerd for the clear instructions. I’d been putting off doing this, but another fried SD card gave me the final push. Very simple with my setup - a Pi4B with a Samsung T5 USB SSD drive. It boots and operates quicker and I’m glad to not be reliant on flaky SD cards anymore.
What I’m not sure about is how I’m going to back it up. Volumio and 280 GB music files on the one 500 GB drive is too big to save as an .img. Is it possible to back up the Volumio image without the data in /data/INTERNAL?
Cheers, Simon
Beside the Backup and Restore plugin, which creates settings backup, there no other tools readily available. Making an img file using dd out of large storage can be truncated to a specific size. There is a risk, that something may be amiss.
Thank, do you know if it’s possible to add rpi-eeprom-config utility in futur volumio release, so we won’t have to go back to sd card each time i would like to do some test ?
The rpi-eeprom-config is on the roadmap for Volumio OS future major release. Backporting to the current release with such excessive effort is simply impractical.
The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ has the capability to boot from USB drives without needing any special configuration or setting changes. Please flash latest Volumio OS to your USB drive directly.
