Use an external drive to drive your Raspberry Pi

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Over at Adafruit, Brennen Bearnes has written a great tutorial and helper script that will enable you to use an external drive as a “root partition”. This means that although your Pi still boots from the SD card, thereafter everything else is handled by the external drive. He’s used a full-sized drive here, but I guess the principle works for things like USB pen drives. Read the tutorial here.

2 comments for “Use an external drive to drive your Raspberry Pi

  1. A very useful and instructive tutorial, well done. Thank you for sharing that with us.

    I will be implementing this asap with a USB Stick drive.

    ( Off the topic: I have now some 3 SD’s that will not boot but are formatable and writable/readable under windows format and with SDFormat. The OS is on the card ok but not boot.- multi SDFORMAT’s do not help
    For the next version of RPi I’d like a SSD/HDD/USB Boot as well as the SD Card. )

  2. A clear and useful tutorial… it’s works too! Unfortunately, how to safely backup and restore the SD card and the HDD is not addressed. Please will you provide a tutorial on the best way to perform backup/restore.

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