My SSD drive is Samsung M 31 NVME (1.00), in order to pair it with RPi4 I had to buy extra adapter, so I bought one with RTL9210 controller which is proven to work with RPi4 in general, I saw youtube videos with it. I have pretty decent firmware on my Pi which is provided straight from updates delivered with Raspbian OS, It's not latest but decent. Decent enough to enable USB boot with sd card removed out. I did it. I resorted image with Ubuntu Mate 20.10.1 on my SSD by extracting it (unxz) first. Afterwards I restored image with dd tool. I did it like that because Gnome disks couldn't restore image from some reason (I've got currently Raspbian minimal with MATE installed by me). When I gave a try to boot, then I saw that Pi tells me that SD card is not present and boot from USB is preformed. And everything what I see is blank/black screen. Can somebody help me to go any further?
Hi kyrol,
If you correctly saved and restored your system img in ssd, then all partitions must show in it, and you can check them in live mode. So if it don't boot with totally black screen, could be a bootloader issue.
Try to install and update grub in live mode. Assuming your ssd is /dev/sda:
sudo update-grub
sudo grub-install /dev/sda
Then run bios mode and select start from ubuntu usb menuentry. Otherwise your img could be sadly corrupted.
Lucky
Hi Tim
In my case two partitions are mounted: system-boot and writable, 3rd one is not mounted because it is unused space, as I suppose some script should expand free space as writable but this is possible when boot of Ubuntu Mate will be successful.
I also think that image might be broken because Gnome Disks hangs when I try to restore either .img or img.xz file, but this might be happen because of a couple of reasons. First repository in Raspberry OS is pretty old and some features might be missing as i.e. proper SSD support/alignment, Second image might be really broken, I think that dd always will restore everything blindly while Gnome Disks might do some extra checks and in result is more sensitive regarding broken image files.
Can I do your advice using chmod? If so as which user and what the password is? I also thought that image could be broken but I extracted an image earlier and now I do not have img.xz file (unxz removed that file), so I can not do checksum work anymore. I have limited internet bandwidth at home but I give a try with download later on.
Hi kyrol,
I think in order to restore your img in your ssd, you can try to follow this tuto. Maybe can give you some ideas. It's made for sd card img, but probably can be done for ssd too. I don't know if ssd could be the problem, but i guess not. You know, correct alignment of sectors and partitions is essential for restoring, and img must be same or smaller than your drive destination.
Lucky