For those of you who, like me, are new to Umbrel and purchased a Pi5 and an NVMe SSD, you will likely be struggling to get the OS installed and running. I hope to save you many hours of frustration trying to figure it out, especially if you’re a novice user.
Equipment I used:
Pi5 8G
Pi OEM Power Supply
WD Black SN770 2T NVMe SSD
PCIe to SSD M.2 Board (I used this one: Geekworm 1002)
Case of your choice Note that the board you select may interfere with the cooling unit of your case, so shop around.
Once you’re successfully booting from the NVMe SSD, log in via SSH and use the CURL command to download and install Umbrel (at this writing version 0.5.4). If you desire to install Umbrel in its own folder, rather than the root, other command line options are available. curl -L https://umbrel.sh | bash
That should do it! Hope this helps save everyone as much pain as I had trying to figure all this out not nowing that Umbrel 1.x did not yet support NVMe SSDs.
UPDATE: Since I wrote the above guide, Umbrel has pulled code for a CURL install, so for step 3, you will have to flash the Umbrel package directly to an SSD rather than PiOS. Once you apply the changes outlined in the instructions, remove the mSD and the Pi will boot directly from your SSD, and you can then proceed with the install via IP.
Thank you i am
A novice and i had Umbrel installed on my ras 5 with a hdd usb linked. Due to performance and noise decided to upgrade to nvme and i am waiting for it.
i hope i’ll be able to do so; i will follow your guide. I was hoping for smth simple
If you’ve already done a custom install on your Pi 5 to get it working before official support then migrating the data would take a few steps.
Stop Umbrel from running
Create a tarball of the installation directory (usually /home/umbrel/umbrel on official installs but you may have installed elsewhere)
Copy the tarball somewhere else safe not on your SSD
Flash the umbrelOS beta onto the NVMe SSD
Stop Umbrel (sudo systemctl stop umbrel)
Extract your previous backup tarball to /home/umbrel/umbrel
Start Umbrel again with sudo systemctl start umbrel
The Umbrel data directory contains all apps and settings, as long as that one directory is backed up, you have everything and can recover your data on a new Umbrel by replacing it’s data directory with your previous one.
For anyone trying to install Umbrel on NVMe drive on Pi 5, without having an NVMe-USB adaptor (in my case I’m using the Geekworm X1001 connected via PCIe ribbon), what eventually worked for me was:
copy the Umbrel OS image zip file to a usb stick and connect it to the Pi
flash Raspberry Pi OS on an SD card, insert it in the Pi and power it up
launch Raspberry Pi Imager (from the Raspberry Pi OS):
Raspberry Pi Device: no filtering
Operating system: select the Umbrel zip file from the usb stick
Choose storage: select the NVMe drive
flash it
You may also need to reconfigure the Pi boot order to use the NVMe, from CLI with
sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit
and change the BOOT_ORDER value, I set mine to 0xf61. Values are:
f = Loop (retry)
1 = SD card
4 = USB
6 = NVMe (PCIe)
After that I removed the SD card, rebooted and Umbrel OS started from the NVMe!
I am currently using Umbrel installed on a Raspberry Pi 5 with an SD card and an external USB hard drive. I would like to migrate to an NVMe. So changing hardware from SD to nvme. Is there a best practice procedure for this?
How can i “restore” on NVMe?
Is it possible to set up Umbrel fresh (because i deinstalled adguard home but there is something left in the system i cant deinstall) and restore app serperate like bitcoin node incl. blockchain and lightning node?
