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I want to use one partition for booting (RASPIOS) and one for the data files. The reasons I have are: 1- cost per GB on SSD devices is less and 2-separate devices causes more heat along with increased load on the power supply. Any booting problems using 2 partitions on one SSD?

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  • What do you mean by 'capture 2 partitions'? – Dirk Aug 6 '20 at 10:02
  • Have one for RASPIOS and one for the data files. I was unable to partition my SD card to do this and wondered if I would have the same problem. – tomd Aug 6 '20 at 10:07
  • What have you tried, how has it failed? Are you using a tool like gparted to help you do what you want? – Dougie Aug 6 '20 at 18:47
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You wrote:

I want to use one partition for booting (RASPIOS) and one for the data files.

The Raspberry Pi OS uses two partitions by default: one for booting, formatted as fat32, and one as root filesystem, formatted as ext4, containing all modules and programs to run the operating system. With a default Raspberry Pi OS the second partition is expanded to its maximum size on first bootup of the image. If using a big SSD device there is a lot of free space available on the second partition you want to store data files. Just create a directory:

rpi ~$ sudo mkdir /data

and use this directory as storage for the data files.

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Yes, you can partition an SSD.

If you're using Windows you can use this guide to partition your SSD: https://www.wikihow.com/Partition-a-Drive-on-Windows

You can then use a tool like Etcher to flash the .iso to the partition you created for your OS.

You can use the other partition for normal storage.

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  • Thanks aklingam but let me apologize for the stupid way I asked my question. The real issue is when you are using the new booting process (using a device on Pi's USB), how does Pi4 know to go to the partition that has RASPIOS? I thought that Pi's boot level is at the device and not a particular entity on that devise. Thanks for any help you can give me. – tomd Aug 6 '20 at 13:45
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    Have you tested that method? AFAIK Etcher writes to a disk, not a partition, meaning you will lose all existing partition info. There are other methods that will work – Dirk Aug 6 '20 at 13:50
  • Thanks, @Dirk you'd have to create the partition after you flash the .iso – aklingam Aug 6 '20 at 15:04
  • @tomd Thanks a lot for the clarification I'm not familiar with how the boot order works on the Pi. Here is some documentation that might help you in case nobody else answers: raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/… – aklingam Aug 6 '20 at 15:09

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