Pi 4 SSD boot stuck on rainbow screen

Question

I'm trying to set up boot from SSD drive, I followed this tutorial, but the raspberry pi 4 got stuck on the rainbow screen and did not boot up. I copied the SD card to SSD using SD card copier, checked fdisk -l to see the SSD drive, output:

... other devices, like SD card, RAM, etc.

Disk /dev/sda: 223,6 GiB, 240057409536 bytes, 468862128 sectors
Disk model: XPG EX500
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x1a14c048

Device     Boot  Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1         8192    532479    524288   256M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2       532480 468862127 468329648 223,3G 83 Linux

Then i ran blkid, which outputed this:

/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="69D5-9B27" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="d9b3f436-01"
/dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="24eaa08b-10f2-49e0-8283-359f7eb1a0b6" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="d9b3f436-02"
/dev/sda1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="69D5-9B27" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="1a14c048-01"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="24eaa08b-10f2-49e0-8283-359f7eb1a0b6" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="1a14c048-02"
/dev/mmcblk0: PTUUID="d9b3f436" PTTYPE="dos"

And finnaly edited cmdline.txt to this:

console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=1a14c048-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles

After this, I rebooted raspberry but then it got stuck on the rainbow screen, so I have to remove SD card and on other PC undo the edit made to cmdline.txt. The reason why I need to have everything on SSD is because the SD card is pretty small and I want to have samba to save files and have the web server with many websites and resources, so I need to have it all on SSD.

EDIT: I know that raspberry pi 4 can not directly boot from SSD and I still need the SD card. It should work in this way: the bootloader will load data from SD card and after it will start booting from the SSD drive so when the boot is completed, the SSD will be the main storage, so everything will be stored on it,e.g. /var/www/* etc.

Answer 1

I don't know what tutorial do you follow. I don't had a look at it, tl;dr. But it cannot belong to Raspberry Pi 4B because that model does not support booting from other devices than an SD Card yet. At Raspberry Pi boot modes you can find:

Note: The Raspberry Pi 4B does not use the bootcode.bin file - instead the bootloader is located in an on-board EEPROM chip. The Pi 4B bootloader currently only supports booting from an SD card. Support for USB host mode boot and Ethernet boot will be added by a future software update. See Pi4 Bootflow and SPI Boot EEPROM.

You may follow the EEPROM Release Notes to observe the ongoing development of USB MSD storage boot in the next beta-series.

Answer 2

The usual (or works for me) method for booting off an external disk with a pi 4 is:

Start with a SD based system and an empty external drive (probably /dev/sda)...
Run fdisk, delete all partitions on /dev/sda.
Create a new primary linux partition. Save and exit.
run sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
sudo mkdir /media/disk
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/disk
sudo rsync -avx / /media/disk

Add "root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait" to the end of the first line in /boot/cmdline.txt Reboot...

Answer 3

You say: The reason why I need to have everything on SSD is because the SD card is pretty small and I want to have samba to save files and have the web server with many websites and resources, so I need to have it all on SSD.

My file server runs from the sd card, but has three drives plugged into the USB ports, two 4TB HDDs [one for 'live' files, one for backups] and one 128GB USB drive, I store all the samba shares there.

By keeping the active OS in a separate partition, if the network shares become full then the OS will still have room to breathe.

Answer 4

I'm not sure if you were able to get it working or not but I was having similar issues using the same process, it turned out that the usb3->sata controller was flaking out on the usb3 ports. I was finally able to fix it using this method. Assuming all your data is still ported over to the /dev/sda1 file system created by the steps above. Then review the steps outlined here to get the drive to properly initialize and run your system from the external.

https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-guide-for-ssd-flash-drives/

Answer 5

there are multiple methods for making the RPi4 run from SSD and use the SD card only for boot, but they all do basically the same thing. What is extremely important is the USB to SATA adapter, I had one that would stop the RPi4 whatever I did, also with USB quirks and so on. There is even a website with adapters, and which work and which not. After changing the adapter, my RPi4 worked for 4 months without any problems, today it stopped and the RPi4 is stuck after the rainbow in the console at second 1.75, Green light no longer blinking. If I connect disconnect the mouse then the console updates. I checked the SD card and it seems to be ok in Windows so what remains is either the SSD is full or something is corrupt. Any idea how to fix it? I had HA running in Docker on the SSD for 4 months collecting data, so I don't want to format the SSD before saving the Docker containers.