Umbrel 1.2 Beta booting from NVME

Support and Troubleshooting
1

Hello,

I’m trying to clone Umbrel 1.2 Beta (currently in a SD card) to my NVME.
No success using ‘SD Card Copier’ OR creating an image directly from ‘Imager’, both on Raspberry Pi OS.
Anyone else had any success? Or can suggest an alternative?
Can Balena Etcher run on RP OS?

PS: The beta version 1.2 already recognise my NVME automatically when booting from the SD card. But I want to run purely from the NVME.

Thank you!

1 Like
2

Hi,
booting from your NVME is supported but not out of the box. Anyway you can follow this guide:

3

I have read this and this example requires to connect the NVME to a PC (directly or via a USB adapter) and that’s not an option for most people.

I wanted to clone the SD card into the NVME somehow.

4

i’m afraid but that’s the requirement. i only can tell you my steps how i’ve achieved this goal:

IMHO it’s a good practice having a nvme adapter.

I was using this one (https://www.digitec.ch/de/s1/product/sandberg-usb-32-dock-for-m2nvme-ssd-ssd-festplatte-zubehoer-24193048?supplier=406802) and attached it to my Linux Laptop.

  1. make a backup via rsync to backup your umbrel folder to external SSD.
  2. attach the above nvme m2 ssd to your laptop
  3. burn the PI5 image to the attached nvme m2 ssd (Balena Etcher)
  4. install the nvme to your rpi 5 (on hat board)
  5. boot pi5. it will boot now from nvme ssd
  6. stop umbrel (sudo systemctl stop umbrel)
  7. restore app-data/bitcoin from your backup’ed external ssd via rsync
  8. re-mount boot partition via “sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/nvme0n1p2 /boot”. /boot is a read- only filesystem. modify /boot/config.txt to set nvme gen3 support. (dtparam=pciex1_gen=3). Will be much more performant.
  9. Reboot

BTW: there is a tool available to write your pi5 image to the nvme directly but haven’t tested it righ now: GitHub - billw2/rpi-clone: A shell script to clone a booted disk.
Maybe you give it a try…