A Step-by-Step Guide to Booting Raspberry Pi from a USB Drive

Learn how to boot your Raspberry Pi from a USB drive with this step-by-step guide. No SD card needed! …


Updated August 24, 2023

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Learn how to boot your Raspberry Pi from a USB drive with this step-by-step guide. No SD card needed!

Raspberry Pi is a popular single board computer used for various projects ranging from home automation, robotics and IoT devices. One of the common issues faced by users is the inability to boot their Raspberry Pi without an SD card. In this article, we will learn how to boot Raspberry Pi from a USB drive on Windows, MacOS and Linux operating systems. This is useful when you need to run a customized OS or if your SD card becomes corrupted or unresponsive.

Step 1: Prepare the USB Drive Before we begin, make sure that you have a USB drive with at least 8GB capacity. We will be using Raspberry Pi Imager to create a bootable USB drive.

Windows and MacOS Users

  • Download and install Raspberry Pi Imager on your computer.
  • Insert the USB drive into your computer.
  • Launch Raspberry Pi Imager and select your OS image file (e.g., Raspbian, Ubuntu) from the list of available options or use custom image.
  • Choose the target drive to be the USB drive you inserted.
  • Click “Write” and wait for the process to finish.

Linux Users You can use the dd command to create a bootable USB drive on Linux. Open your terminal and run:

sudo dd if=path/to/your/image.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M && sync

Replace path/to/your/image.img with the path to your OS image file, and /dev/sdX with the USB drive you want to use (e.g., /dev/sdb). Be careful while running this command as it may overwrite data on your target drive.

Step 2: Configure Your Raspberry Pi to Boot from USB To boot Raspberry Pi from a USB drive, we need to enable the boot_usb flag in the config.txt file located on the root directory of your SD card. If you don’t have an SD card yet, skip this step and proceed to Step 3.

  • Insert the SD card into your computer.
  • Open the config.txt file with a text editor (e.g., Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on MacOS).
  • Add the following line at the end of the file: boot_usb=1
  • Save and close the file.

Step 3: Boot Your Raspberry Pi from USB

  • Connect your Raspberry Pi to a power source, keyboard, mouse (if needed), and monitor.
  • Insert the prepared USB drive into one of the Raspberry Pi’s USB ports.
  • Turn on your Raspberry Pi.

Your Raspberry Pi should now boot from the USB drive. You can use it as you would normally without any issues.

Conclusion Booting a Raspberry Pi from a USB drive is a simple process that allows you to run customized OS or recover from corrupted SD card issues. This method is useful for users who prefer not to rely on an SD card or when the SD card reader is not working properly. Follow these steps and get your Raspberry Pi up and running in no time!