Raspberry Pi 4 / 400 Ubuntu USB Mass Storage Boot Guide

Ubuntu Server 20.04 + Raspberry Pi
Ubuntu Server 20.04 + Raspberry Pi

Official support from Canonical for the Raspberry Pi has come a long way. We can now install officially supported Ubuntu on the Pi! In my previous guide for Ubuntu 18.04 on the Pi the Raspberry Pi was not officially supported yet and to be honest the experience was pretty janky.

The previous LTS “unofficial” release had so many problems I actually rolled my own image with dozens of fixes to common ailments before I quickly realized that maintaining a Linux distro, even in such a limited capacity as patching in and distributing fixed binaries, was a monumental undertaking.

Fortunately the current Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is officially certified for the Raspberry Pi. This combined with Ubuntu’s full 64 bit userland/system environment allows you to take full advantage of the 8 GB Pi’s memory without per-process 3GB memory limits (very useful if you are doing something like running a Minecraft server and want to allocate almost all of the 8 GB to it) means there has never been a better time to give Ubuntu a try on the Pi.

This guide takes it a step further and shows you how to get Ubuntu 20.04 / 20.10 / 21.04 / etc. working with a SSD. Let’s get started!

Equipment Used

Kingston A400 SSD
Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD

The Kingston A400 has been a great drive to use with the Pi for years. It’s reliable, widely available around the world, has low power requirements and performs very well. It’s also very affordable. This drive has been benchmarked over 1000 times at pibenchmarks.com and is the #1 most popular SSD among the Pi community!

Links: AliExpress*, Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.se*, Amazon.sg*

StarTech 2.5" SATA to USB 3.0/3.1 Adapter
StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.1 Adapter

The USB 3.1 variant of the StarTech 2.5″ SATA adapter works well with the Pi 4. The USB 3.0 variant doesn’t have firmware updates available and is not recommended.

Links: Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.se*, Amazon.sg*

NVME Option (powered USB hub required, see “Power Requirements” section in my more generalized Raspberry Pi 4 USB booting guide):

Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD
Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD

The Samsung 970 EVO Plus is a fantastic drive and has fallen in price substantially. It’s widely available around the world. The smaller capacities (such as the 250GB version) of this drive are perfect for the Pi! This is the top performance option without going into the “Pro” series of the lineup which are much more expensive.

Links: AliExpress*, Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.se*, Amazon.sg*

ASUS ROG Strix NVMe Enclosure
ASUS ROG Strix Enclosure

If you really want to take things over the top the ASUS Rog Strix M.2 NVMe enclosure uses the latest USB 3.2 Gen2 specification, is RGB capable and works with the Pi! Unsurprisingly, adding the extra lighting does take extra power! A powered USB hub is also required for this enclosure. More widely available than the ICY BOX but tends to be on the expensive side.

Links: AliExpress*, Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com.au*, *Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.se*, Amazon.sg*

Prerequisites

Verify Power Supply Size (3.5A strongly recommended)

Check your Raspberry Pi’s power supply size and make sure it is delivering at least 3.5A. There are a lot of USB C adapters for the Raspberry Pi that are only 3.0A. These will typically work fine, until you plug in something like a SSD which draws power from the Pi and there is nothing left to give.

Most SSDs are quite power efficient but HDDs draw significantly more. Older generations of SSDs used quite a bit more power than newer ones as well. If you are using an older drive or a drive that you know is power hungry you need to pay extra attention to having a quality power source with plenty of capacity.

A good alternative option to relying on the Pi to power the drive is using a powered USB hub* so your drive doesn’t need to draw power from the Pi’s limited power budget. Make sure you get one that is compatible with the Pi as some powered USB hubs won’t work properly with it so check the reviews and do your research to make sure people are using it successfully with the Pi.

Using a 3.5A power supply* or powered USB hub* will ensure your drive is getting enough power without impacting the Pi’s stability.

Recommended Power Solutions

Sabrent Powered USB Hub
Sabrent Powered USB 3.0 Hub

The Sabrent powered USB hub delivers a whopping 2.5A of dedicated power for your USB attached devices. This is almost as much as the Pi adapter itself is rated for (3.0A). It will easily power the most thirsty of setups such as NVMe enclosures.

Links: Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.se*

Note: Make sure Amazon doesn’t try to take you to the non-powered version and that it’s the one with the AC adapter that plugs in to provide extra power

CanaKit 3.5A Power Adapter
CanaKit 3.5A Power Adapter

The CanaKit 3.5A adapter has an extra half an amp (500 mA) of capacity to give some breathing room to your accessories. This is bigger than the official Pi power supply which provides 3.0A.

Links: Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.sg*

Verify Storage Adapter Compatibility

You will need a USB 3.0 storage adapter. See my other article on USB booting not specific to Ubuntu for a lot more details on the storage adapters!

Get Latest Raspbian & Updates

To update your bootloader / firmware you should use Raspbian on a SD card. Right now support in third party operating systems to do anything with the new Raspberry Pi 4’s firmware or bootloader is very limited / nonexistent. You can use a third party operating system later once you set the boot mode, but to actually make these changes we will use official Raspbian.

First make sure that you have the absolute latest updates and firmware for the Pi. To upgrade all your packages and firmware to the latest version use the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Once the update has completed restart your Pi with a sudo reboot command to apply the latest firmware / kernel updates.

Verify EEPROM Bootloader is up to date

We can check if your Pi’s bootloader firmware is up to date with the following command:

sudo rpi-eeprom-update

If your Raspbian is *very* out of date you may not have this utility and can install it using:

sudo apt install rpi-eeprom

The output from rpi-eeprom-update will look like this if you are not up to date:

BCM2711 detected
VL805 firmware in bootloader EEPROM
*** UPDATE AVAILABLE ***
BOOTLOADER: update available
CURRENT: Thu 3 Sep 12:11:43 UTC 2020 (1599135103)
LATEST: Tue 24 Nov 15:08:04 UTC 2020 (1606230484)
FW DIR: /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta
VL805: up-to-date
CURRENT: 000138a1
LATEST: 000138a1

If it says any updates are available they be installed manually by adding ‘-a’ to the end of our previous command like this:

sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a

After the updates finish installing restart your Pi as firmware updates will not be applied until after a reboot. Now if you run rpi-eeprom-update to check for updates again it should say you are on the latest and up to date!

Changing rpi-eeprom’s Release Channel

Note: As of February 16th the firmware available in the “critical” branch is new enough to USB boot so I no longer recommend changing this. One reader even let me know in the comments that on the “stable” channel his storage was getting corrupted prompting a full reinstall!

By default you will only receive updates from Raspbian’s “critical” channel. This is a very conservative firmware update channel that will only give you very well tested firmware updates that are considered critical fixes for the device. Another channel that is available is “stable”.

Carlos and other commenters have reported that the current “critical” firmware didn’t work for them and they had to upgrade to the “stable” channel.

To switch to the stable channel we are going to edit the file /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update:

sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update

Change the line FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS=”critical” to:

FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS="stable"

Now you can run sudo rpi-eeprom-update and you should see a new update available.

Install Ubuntu on USB Storage Device

The new official Raspberry Pi imaging tool is really good. It’s available on Windows, Linux and MacOS and is a small and fast download. It also works fine on most USB mass storage devices like SSDs. Since Ubuntu is now officially supported the image itself is also available in this tool which saves you the trouble of having to find and download the right image files.

64 bit images are recommended for the Pi 4 for better performance but the 32 bit images work as well.

If you want to do things the traditional way you can download the image from the main Ubuntu site and write it yourself using Etcher / dd / Win32diskimager / your preferred tool and skip to the next section. It’s recommended to create the media with the Raspberry Pi Imager unless you are having problems with that utility or are using this as a troubleshooting step.

Once you’ve downloaded the tool run it as administrator/sudo to avoid permission errors. To run the utility from the command line is usually sudo rpi-imager. You’ll be greeted with this screen:

Raspberry Pi Imager - Main Menu
Raspberry Pi Imager – Main Menu

Next click the “Choose OS” button:

Raspberry Pi Imager - OS Menu
Raspberry Pi Imager – OS Menu

Ahh, the benefits of being officially supported! Ubuntu is right there on the list waiting for us. Select the Ubuntu option and you will get the different choices of flavors/architectures. There’s Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Core in various forms of 64-bit (arm64) and 32-bit (armhf).

If you want to use the out-of-the-box Ubuntu Desktop edition you need to use the 64 bit Ubuntu 20.10 image as they never made a 20.04 desktop version for some reason. This really isn’t usually a big deal though because you can always choose the “Server” version and install Ubuntu’s desktop environment later with:

sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop

Once you’ve selected the edition you want go ahead and pick the “Choose SD Card” option and write the image. Despite not being a SD card my USB mass storage devices showed up anyway (writing the guide I used a StarTech adapter and a Kingston A400 SSD).

I’m sure some of you will manage to find unusual devices and configurations that may not show up in this tool. It doesn’t appear to show “fixed drives” that are physically installed in your machine. Regardless if it is causing a headache you may need to do it the old fashioned way and download the image from the main Ubuntu site and write the image using your favorite imaging tool instead.

Modifying Ubuntu for USB Booting

We need to make some changes to the Ubuntu drive we just created before we boot from it. Make sure your Pi is powered on and booted into Raspbian then plug in your newly imaged Ubuntu drive. We are going to make the changes using the Pi.

Find and Mount Storage Device

First let’s find your storage device using the command:

lsblk

This will show you all the storage devices attached to your system:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0   256M  0 part 
└─sda2        8:2    0   2.8G  0 part 
mmcblk0     179:0    0  59.5G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0   256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  59.2G  0 part /

Your SD card will always start with mmcblk so you can rule that one out. That leaves sda as the only other disk device on the system. This will be the same for most of you but depending on what type of drive and storage adapter you use this can vary. You can substitute whatever yours is in place of /dev/sda in these instructions going forward. If yours is sdb use /dev/sdb. If it’s nvme0 use /dev/nvme0, etc.

In my output under the “MOUNTPOINT” column you can see it is blank. This means the drive isn’t mounted on my system. My mmcblk0p1 mountpoint though is not blank and is “/boot” as an example of a non-blank mountpoint. If you are using the full “Desktop” version of Raspbian it may have automatically mounted your drive and created 2 shortcuts on your desktop that will take you to the files. If your mountpoint is not blank and has something like /media/pi/writable go ahead and unmount them now using the following commands substituting the mountpoint listed for your drive:

sudo umount /media/pi/writable
sudo umount /media/pi/system-boot

Now we are going to create two mountpoints and mount the Ubuntu drive. Use these commands substituting your own drive it is not /dev/sda:

sudo mkdir /mnt/boot
sudo mkdir /mnt/writable
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/writable

Once you have mounted everything correctly your lsblk command’s output should look like this with the mountpoint field now populated:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0   256M  0 part /mnt/boot
└─sda2        8:2    0   2.8G  0 part /mnt/writable
mmcblk0     179:0    0  59.5G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0   256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  59.2G  0 part /

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option A – Automated Script

If you just want to get your Ubuntu partition bootable I have made an automated script to do this. As long as you have mounted the partitions as /mnt/boot and /mnt/writable the script will make the necessary changes for Ubuntu 20.04 / 20.10 to boot! The source code for the script is available at https://github.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/blob/master/BootFix.sh

Here is a one liner to run the script:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/master/BootFix.sh | sudo bash

You may also download it for inspection (such as nano BootFix.sh or opening it in the Text Editor if you are using Desktop Raspbian) with:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/Ubuntu-Server-raspi4-unofficial/master/BootFix.sh -O BootFix.sh
chmod +x BootFix.sh
nano BootFix.sh

To execute the script use:

sudo ./BootFix.sh

As long as you mounted your partitions correctly it will modify the partition and tell you that it was successful. Now unmount your partitions with the following commands:

sudo umount /mnt/boot
sudo umount /mnt/writable

You may now shut down your Pi and remove the SD card from the Pi leaving just the USB mass storage device plugged in. Reconnect the power.

Modify Mounted Partitions – Option B – Manual Instructions

See bottom of the article for the manual instructions section

First Boot

If all went well the system should boot up into Ubuntu’s logon screen! The default credentials are:

Username: ubuntu
Password: ubuntu

Before logging in for the first time you will be forced to select a new password. Once you have done that you will be fully logged in!

Important Note: Upon logging in for the first time if the Pi is connected to the internet Ubuntu will immediately/soon start a lengthy update process via snapd and apt.  This can be annoying since you'll be ready to start configuring the system and if you do an apt install it will halt and wait for the updates to finish.  

It may seem like they're stuck, but if you use the 'top' command you will see all sorts of apt/package/update/extraction related activity happening.  Even on my 8 GB Pi and a gigabit fiber connection these took a good 20 minutes or so before my CPU activity went back to 0 and the apt lock released.

I highly recommend letting these finish and not yanking the power on the Pi / forcing a reboot / trying to kill the processes.  It will often cause a ton of very nasty apt and dpkg problems to the point where it's easier to start over from a fresh image than try to fsck and apt install --fix-broken your way out of it  Try to do other necessary configuration that doesn't involve apt in the mean time and let these finish in the background.

Once the patching is finished your shiny new Ubuntu 20.04 system is fully ready to use!

Manual Instructions

These are the manual instructions to recreate what the automated script does. If you used the automated script you don’t need to do anything further in this section unless you want to understand more about how it works or you want to do the process manually.

Decompress the kernel

We need to decompress the kernel as we will be changing the way the Pi is booting. Ubuntu uses u-boot by default and we will be switching away from that. We can do this with the following command:

zcat -qf "/mnt/boot/vmlinuz" > "/mnt/boot/vmlinux"

Update config.txt with correct parameters

Now let’s update /mnt/boot/config.txt with the parameters we need to load the decompressed kernel. Open up config.txt with nano with:

sudo nano /mnt/boot/config.txt

Change the [pi4] section to the following contents:

[pi4]
max_framebuffers=2
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
boot_delay
kernel=vmlinux
initramfs initrd.img followkernel

Create script to automatically decompress kernel

We are going to create a script to automatically decompress the kernel. If we don’t do this we have to decompress it every time Ubuntu updates. This particular part of the script was not written by me and was found at the post on the Raspberry Pi forums by egrechko.

First let’s create the decompression script. Open up a new file with nano using:

sudo nano /mnt/boot/auto_decompress_kernel

Paste the following contents:

#!/bin/bash -e
# auto_decompress_kernel script
BTPATH=/boot/firmware
CKPATH=$BTPATH/vmlinuz
DKPATH=$BTPATH/vmlinux
# Check if compression needs to be done.
if [ -e $BTPATH/check.md5 ]; then
   if md5sum --status --ignore-missing -c $BTPATH/check.md5; then
      echo -e "\e[32mFiles have not changed, Decompression not needed\e[0m"
      exit 0
   else
      echo -e "\e[31mHash failed, kernel will be compressed\e[0m"
   fi
fi
# Backup the old decompressed kernel
mv $DKPATH $DKPATH.bak
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mDECOMPRESSED KERNEL BACKUP FAILED!\e[0m"
   exit 1
else
   echo -e "\e[32mDecompressed kernel backup was successful\e[0m"
fi
# Decompress the new kernel
echo "Decompressing kernel: "$CKPATH".............."
zcat -qf $CKPATH > $DKPATH
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mKERNEL FAILED TO DECOMPRESS!\e[0m"
   exit 1
else
   echo -e "\e[32mKernel Decompressed Succesfully\e[0m"
fi
# Hash the new kernel for checking
md5sum $CKPATH $DKPATH > $BTPATH/check.md5
if [ ! $? == 0 ]; then
   echo -e "\e[31mMD5 GENERATION FAILED!\e[0m"
else
   echo -e "\e[32mMD5 generated Succesfully\e[0m"
fi
exit 0

Create apt script to call kernel decompression script automatically

This is a one liner to create a script to call the auto_decompress_kernel script:

echo 'DPkg::Post-Invoke {"/bin/bash /boot/firmware/auto_decompress_kernel"; };' | sudo tee /mnt/writable/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/999_decompress_rpi_kernel

Verify Drive Performance

You can make sure everything is running correctly (and as fast as it should be) by running my quick storage benchmark. You can run the benchmark with the following one-liner:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

This will give you a score you can compare to the other Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmark results and make sure that you are getting an equivalent speed to your peers with the same device!

Fix (some) USB Adapter Problems Using Quirks

Some storage adapters don’t work very well with the Raspberry Pi 4. There is an option that can get a lot of them working using quirks. If your Ubuntu is booting to emergency mode but not in normal mode it’s worth giving quirks a try. This lowers performance, but it’s still much faster than a SD card and your adapter won’t go to waste.

To find out the quirks mode string to use we need to find the device ID string for your adapter and then add an entry to cmdline.txt telling the kernel to apply them on boot.

Find Your Adapter

To apply the quirks we first need to get the adapter id. We will use the sudo lsusb command:

$ sudo lsusb
 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
 Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2109:3431 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub
 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

On line 2 we can see my ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge adapter (it’s the known working StarTech.com 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.1* adapter). You will see something very similar to mine when you run the command and it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which device it is. If you need more information add a -v switch to make the command sudo lsusb -v. This can sometimes add some additional details to make it easier to figure out which one is your adapter.

If you’re still not sure, we have another command that between the two that can narrow things down. Type / paste the following:

sudo dmesg | grep usb

 [0.828535] usb usb3: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0002, bcdDevice= 4.19
 [0.828568] usb usb3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1
 [0.828597] usb usb3: Product: DWC OTG Controller
 [0.828620] usb usb3: Manufacturer: Linux 4.19.75-v7l+ dwc_otg_hcd
 [0.828644] usb usb3: SerialNumber: fe980000.usb
 [0.830051] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
 [0.830182] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
 [0.836488] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
 [0.836511] usbhid: USB HID core driver
 [0.971598] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
 [1.154217] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=2109, idProduct=3431, bcdDevice= 4.20
 [1.154254] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
 [1.154281] usb 1-1: Product: USB2.0 Hub
 [1.301989] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
 [1.332965] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
 [1.332999] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
 [1.333026] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
 [1.333048] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
 [1.333071] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F

This is the dmesg log showing the hardware detection as hardware is activated on the Pi. If your log is really long you can generate fresh entries by just unplugging a device and plugging it back in and running the command again. Here we can clearly see that the ASM105x is what our StarTech adapter is being detected as.

Now we can go back to our first lsusb command and we want the 8 characters from the ID field that comes right after the Device:

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge

Our adapter’s ID is: 174c:55aa

Applying Quirks

To apply the quirks to our USB adapter we are going to edit /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt. Type:

sudo nano /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

We are going to add the following entry into the very front of cmdline.txt:

usb-storage.quirks=XXXX:XXXX:u

In place of the X’s above you will put in your adapter’s ID that we got before. With the example commands I gave above mine would look like this: usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u. After this my cmdline.txt looks like this (everything should be one continuous line, no line breaks!):

usb-storage.quirks=174c:55aa:u dwg_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=LABEL=writable rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait fixrtc

Now reboot the Pi. If the Pi fails to boot you can plug the SD card into the computer and go to /boot/cmdline.txt and undo the change we did so you can boot back in with your SD card.

Verifying Quirks

Once you have rebooted after changing cmdline.txt we can verify the quirks have been applied by doing another dmesg | grep usb command:

sudo dmesg | grep usb
 [1.332924] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa, bcdDevice= 1.00
 [1.332957] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
 [1.332983] usb 2-1: Product: ASM105x
 [1.333006] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMT
 [1.333028] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 123456789B79F
 [1.335967] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
 [1.336071] usb 2-1: UAS is blacklisted for this device, using usb-storage instead
 [1.336103] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
 [1.336479] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: Quirks match for vid 174c pid 55aa: c00000
 [1.336611] scsi host0: usb-storage 2-1:1.0

This time we can see in dmesg that UAS was blacklisted for the device and it has loaded with the usb-storage driver instead. This driver tends to be more compatible with the “problematic adapters” but the performance is usually significantly lower. It’s definitely worth a try though as some adapters do better with the quirks performance-wise. The only way to know for sure is to run a benchmark (see “Verify Drive Performance” section).

Other Resources

I compiled the 2022 Raspberry Pi Storage benchmarks which shows the fastest storage devices for the Pi

For easy headless imaging (does support Ubuntu) check out my Headless Raspberry Pi configuration guide

To find out where to get the 64 bit version of Raspberry Pi OS: where to get the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS image

To find out how to add a UPS backup battery to your Pi check out my UPS for Raspberry Pi guide

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Kyle
Kyle
3 years ago

Hello Jim, just wanted to say thanks for this info and script. I to have the Argon M.2 case with a Kingston 240 gig Sata SSD. The Argon M.2 will not do NVMe. I installed 20.10 desktop using your instructions and script with no problem. Then I chickened out and felt I wanted LTS. So I did server then installed the desktop so far so good. Now I just need to figure out turning overscan turned oh on my 4K monitor and I should be good. I plan to make this my developers workstation per DroneBot Workshops guide 🙂
I’ll let you know if anything goes nutty 🙂
Thanks again really appreciate it.

Rob
Rob
3 years ago

James
I’ve followed your tutorial on installing Ubuntu 20.04 on my Pi4.
When I try to boot the new OS from the Samsung BAR Plus flash drive, the installation proceeds until it hang on the login after printing information about cloud-initial.
I am using my iPad as a wireless hotspot and it’s clearly not connecting. I did not have this issue when I originally installed 20.04 on an SD card.
When I did that installation and installed the imager to the SD card the Ubuntu tutorial stated that the network-config file on the card had to be modified to include my network name and password. So I did the same on the USB drive, however, as I’ve said, it appears the installation on the USB drive hangs because the internet connection fails.
I do not have access to an Ethernet connection to the Internet.
Any suggestions as to how I can get the installation to recognise my hotspot Internet connection?

Rob
Rob
3 years ago

James
Thanks for your reply and suggestions.
I should have added to my original reply that I found the explanations and instructions in your tutorial extremely clear and helpful.
I should also have added, by way of explanation, that I am currently using my RPi4 running Ubuntu desktop over Ubuntu 20.04 OS on a trial basis in parallel to my Windows 8.1 desktop with the intention of eventually dumping the Windows 8.1 desktop. Consequently, I am experimenting with the Pi4 and have loaded several apps and configurations. I was hoping to boot from the USB and copy my configuration from my working sd card, rather than a new installation.
Following your suggestions, I decided to do the following, in order:
1. Try, again, to load from the USB that is causing the issue. It failed again.
2. Copy the sdf2 writable partition from my currently operating sd card using the ‘dd’ command. The result was that the Pi4 booted to the Ubuntu desktop login screen, but I could not log in as the keyboard and mouse were inoperative. I noticed during that startup that numerous other features failed.
3. Finally, I decided to do a complete reinstall. I downloaded and installed the Raspberry Pi4 OS (64 bit edition). Although I’m unsure whether it made any difference, I also followed the suggestion to select the boot from USB option in the Raspberry OS raspi-config file before removing the sd card.
I then erased the USB drive using the Raspberry Imager on my Windows desktop then downloaded the Ubuntu 20.04 (64 bit) OS image. I made the changes advised by the Ubuntu installation tutorial to the network-config file using a text editor to allow installation over wi-fi.
When I removed the sd card and inserted the USB drive and started the Pi4, to my surprise, it successfully went through the installation process. It did hang again over the cloud-init comment. I waited for several minutes, then hit enter. Immediately, the login screen appeared. I logged in, changed the password, then completed the installation, then installed Ubuntu desktop.
I did have to then configure my 50-cloud-initial.yaml file to enable File Manager to manage my wi-fi hotspot connection through both my iPad and iPhone.
Although I had to then reinstall apps and configure my system again, I now have a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OS that is happily booting from my USB device.
I also have the same configuration on my original sd card as a backup, which still works.
I haven’t measured the performance improvement, but the USB boot is noticeably quicker.
I have detailed my experience in the hope that it might assist and or encourage others who want to experiment with the RPi.
Thanks again for your assistance. Truly appreciated.

Rob
Rob
3 years ago

James

I went to do the performance tests that you mentioned, but did an update and upgrade first.

When I did the upgrade, I received the following response, which I suspect is related to the changes to the USB boot.

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Setting up initramfs-tools (0.136ubuntu6.3) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Setting up flash-kernel (3.103ubuntu1~20.04.1) ...
Using DTB: bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb
Installing /lib/firmware/5.4.0-1028-raspi/device-tree/broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.d
tb into /boot/dtbs/5.4.0-1028-raspi/./bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb
Taking backup of bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb.
Installing new bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb.
flash-kernel: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.136ubuntu6.3) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-1028-raspi
Using DTB: bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb
Installing /lib/firmware/5.4.0-1028-raspi/device-tree/broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.d
tb into /boot/dtbs/5.4.0-1028-raspi/./bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb
Taking backup of bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb.
Installing new bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb.
Installing /lib/firmware/5.4.0-1028-raspi/device-tree/broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.d
tb into /boot/dtbs/5.4.0-1028-raspi/./bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb
Taking backup of bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb.
Installing new bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb.
flash-kernel: installing version 5.4.0-1028-raspi
Taking backup of vmlinuz.
Installing new vmlinuz.
Taking backup of initrd.img.
Installing new initrd.img.
Generating boot script u-boot image... /usr/sbin/flash-kernel: 553: mkimage: not
found
run-parts: /etc/initramfs/post-update.d//flash-kernel exited with return code 12
7
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned
error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
Files have not changed, Decompression not needed
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I’ve tried autoremove, autoclean and forced upgrade, but still get this response.

Can you suggest a fix?

Regards.

Rob

Rob
Rob
3 years ago

James

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Being impatient, I tried various solutions, including removing previous Linux-images, fixing broken packages, forced install, etc, with no resolution.

What does appear to have resolved the issue (so far – fingers crossed) was to:

sudo rm initramfs-tools

sudo apt clean

sudo apt autoremove

sudo apt install initramfs-tools

This was one of the solutions mentioned on askubuntu

I’ll let you know if the solution hold.

I also ran the performance tests. In summary, the score for the SanDisk High Endurance 64GB SD card was 1,130 and the Samsung BAR Plus 3.1 USB drive was 2,830. A significant improvement with the USB drive.

I hope this information assists others who encounter a similar issue.

Regards.

Rob

Rob Foster
Rob Foster
3 years ago
Reply to  Rob

James

Couldn’t help myself, so I’ve used the dd command to copy my whole system from the Samsung BAR Plus 3.1 USB drive to a Kingston A400 240GB SSD with the StarTech USB adapter that I bought today and the performance score has gone from 2,830 (Samsung) to 7,035 (Kingston) – a further significant improvement.

Seems to be functioning correctly, except that I had to extend the writable partition (sdg2 on my system) on the Kingston SSD from 64GB (on the Samsung) to 240Gb on the Kingston BEFORE I did the dd copy. My first effort by not extending the writable partition first was that I stuffed-up that partition trying to extend it AFTER the dd copy.

Thanks again for your extremely helpful tutorial and subsequent support.

Rob

Alain C
Alain C
3 years ago
Reply to  Rob

I had the same experience (Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi 4B), same initramfs error message on upgrade, your solution fixed it for me.

Thank you very much.

Kyle
Kyle
3 years ago

Hello James
Thanks for the reply. I did find that installing server then desktop left a lot of things lacking, so reinstalled 20.10 and found that to be much more complete and it seemed a good fit for running 64 bit. My issue became the resources that were being used made using it trying. Each core of the CPU ran from 15% to 60% all the time. I let it sit for awhile to see if things were just “settling in” but it just kept going. The Pi was running much hotter than normal it seemed too. Unfortunately I reverted back to PiOS for the time being and will come back to this later. It is nice having a full desktop but just too slow. By the way I am using a 8Gig Pi with Argon 40/M.2 addon case. I’ll check back later to see if maybe I messed something and you can point me in the right direction. Thanks again this is a great tutorial you’ve done here.

Chad Corbin
Chad Corbin
3 years ago

Thanks so much for this tutorial! Confirmed that Ubuntu MATE 20.10 also boots from USB natively (maybe not surprising to many). Also, may be obvious to others, but I still had to:

sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update
FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS="stable"
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a
sudo -E rpi-eeprom-config --edit
BOOT_ORDER=0xf41

under Raspberry Pi OS before the Pi would boot to USB. The “rpi-eeprom-config” change was mentioned in the previous tutorial, but missing from this one.

Now booting successfully using the Argon One M.2 case and Samsung 860 EVO M.2 SSD.

One issue I’ve encountered (may be specific to the Argon One or may be common to USB boot in general) is that the Pi will freeze whenever it is put into suspend (automatically through power management, or manually from a menu), requiring a hard reset. I haven’t confirmed if this is the case with USB boot generally.

minnix
minnix
3 years ago

Hey James thanks for this. One issue I’m having is when imaging ubuntu 64bit 20.04 server to a 4tb ssd with the raspberry pi imager, ubuntu is only using 1.7tb (about half the drive). lsblk shows the disk as being 3.7tb though but root partition is only 1.7tb. Is there a way to use the entire drive? Everything boots fine it’s just that one issue.

RobBohn
RobBohn
3 years ago
Reply to  minnix

Check if it is using LVM – my Ubuntu 20.10 server installation used LVM and only setup about 200GB on a 1TB drive. Here’s what I did:

# View the current logical disk space
sudo df -h /home/
# **Avail** column is disk space remaining on this logical disk

# View the disk’s LVM disk space
sudo pvs
# **PFree** column is remaining disk available to you

# See Logical Volume info
sudo lvdisplay

# To extend your logical disk to use all available space do the following…….

# Extend your logical volume – the last arg is the Filesystem in df -h command
sudo lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

# Resize the Filesystem to match – the last arg is the Filesystem in df -h command
sudo resize2fs -p /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

# see that it worked – **Size** should now be larger
sudo df -h /home/

minnix
minnix
3 years ago

Ok I figured out the issue. The rpi ubuntu images use MBR instead of GPT disk partition tables, and MBR only supports 2tb or smaller drives. As far as I can tell there is no way to boot from larger than a 2tb disk with ubuntu rpi image. Raspberry pi os does support GPT but ubuntu rpi images do not. That is a shame. If you want to use ubuntu on a 4tb disk you will still need an sd card to boot from and move root to the usb disk, same as the old way.

minnix
minnix
3 years ago

There is an alternative if you’d like to use a 64bit OS with a disk over 2tb. Akeo (the creator of the Rufus disk imager) has laid out a method to install Debian bullseye using the netinstall iso directly to USB drive. Basically you format the drive with gpt partition table and create about a 350mb bootable partition (esp fat32, or in fdisk just use option 1 which is EFI partition which is what I did), then copy over the contents of the latest RPI EFI firmware and the contents of the debian netinstall iso into the new partition as well. Plug in the drive and turn on the Rpi 4 and you will be greeted by the debian installer, no SD card needed. Worked fine for me. He laid it out on the rpi forums.

I kind of prefer this to ubuntu as I don’t need a desktop (even though you can install one if you’d like) and wanted something light and fast for server usage.

RobBohn
RobBohn
3 years ago
Reply to  RobBohn

I did a default 64-bit Ubuntu Server install, and it must be doing this as some sort of almost thin provisioning, allowing me to choose later if I want to expand the same volume or alternatively make a separate/additional volume. But it seems backwards from previous experience. I had this just happen on five X64 systems with 3 different disk sizes – all made a single 200GB volume, leaving the rest unallocated. Weird.

Andres Torres
Andres Torres
3 years ago

Hi James! Thank you very much for the guide, it is really helpful.
Just somethings i’d like to add hoping they can help others to overcome any issues with the installation process. I followed the guide using a Raspberry 4b 8Gb, using both scenarios, meaning flashing a USB 3 stick with Ubuntu Server 20.04 with Etcher and Raspberry imager, i had a boot issue in the last step where the PI complained about the SSD not being inserted, to fix this i was missing to set the option “Boot with USB if SSD is not present or has a problem” under the Advanced menu in raspi-config.

Enabling this allowed the boot from the USB as expected. There is some UDEV issue on boot where some process gets stuck and it takes around 3mins for it to resume loading Ubuntu, more about it here.

The solution was to run systemctl mask systemd-udev-settle. After the system boots there is no ETH0 connection, the ethernet card simply won’t work but what i did is connect my raspberry to my wifi and run a distro-upgrade, after upgrading the system it seems that netplan gets fixed and automatically you get ethernet working along with wifi.

Stigh
Stigh
3 years ago

Hi James,

I followed your example using an RPi4 8Gb, installing rOS first and ran the RPi Imager choosing 20.04 LTS Server 64bit, installed it on myUSB3 SSD. Success. Then I did the manual steps regarding lsblk and finally ran the script. Success. Removed SD for booting Ubuntu…
It stop with a “Kernel Panic – Not syncing! : Can not allocate SWIOTLB buffer earlier and can’t now provide you with the DMA bounce buffer”

Any suggestions?

Stigh
Stigh
3 years ago

Hey James,

Currently writing to 20.10 Server 64-bit to the SSD for testing….

Question; when I run the script and files are downloaded and written to ‘a’ partition – is this to the SD or SSD?
As I retried the 20.04, I suddenly realized looking further up in the process there is insufficient space, probably causing the issue.

Quite a noob still, espcially on linux partitions structure. Sorry for my dumb question.

Stigh
Stigh
3 years ago

Resolving deltas: 100% (3641/3641), done.
error: unable to write file modules/5.10.6+/kernel/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_sip.ko
…and a bunch more ‘unable to write…’

PS; I am running rOS from a regular thumbdrive and a SSD from another USB but this shouldn’t matter?

Stigh
Stigh
3 years ago

Hey James,

I will try fsck tomorrow.

I booted with the USB thumbdrive inserted only, then I inserted the SSD.
After that I ran the PRi Imager and wrote the image to the SSD.
From there, I start with your guide.

I’m using the new Argon ONE M.2 case so I’m not sure what “adapter” it uses.

Stigh
Stigh
3 years ago

Hey James, then I got everything working – the fault was using the ‘base’ rOS on a thunbdrive, even if I installed without connecting the SSD, where connecting the SSD after booted into rOS on the thumbrive. So a suggested addon in the guide, do NOT try to install and run rOS onto a thumbdrive, then inserting the SSD and continue. It will fail.

Using a SD card, it worked straight forward, testing both 20.04 LTS Server 64 bit and 20.10 Desktop 64 bit.

A final question; do you recommend running 20.04 or 20.10 on the RPi ?

Stigh
Stigh
3 years ago

Hey James,

Thank you for replying and for pointing me to test the SD card rather than thumbdrive 🙂 This was actually a quite ‘natural’ thought as when the Argon One-case are assembled, you can’t access the SD card slot. So, when using this case, keep it open until scripts are open and you can remove the SD card before finally rebooting to start Ubuntu.

Stigh
Stigh
3 years ago

Hi James, regarding the Argon case, I think I read somewhere that is doesn’t support NVMe M.2’s – if this casing are to be considered, please check this thoroughly.

Ben
Ben
3 years ago

A note for overclocking:

It is still possible to overclock your pi in ubuntu by changing arm_freq in config.txt BUT the boot partition isnt necessarily in /boot. For me (by running mount | grep boot) my boot partition is in /boot/firmware, which is where i found config.txt.

Im a noob and it took me 3 hours to figure this out

Ben
Ben
3 years ago

Bought an ROG STRIX Arion and Crucial P1 for a minecraft server.
I followed all the instructions and after rebooting i was met with ‘no sd card, please insert’. Had this issue for 3 hours while i messed around trying to get it working. eeprom was up to date, tried 20.10/04 and 18, manually doing the script steps, the img straight from the website, different ports, different cables, nothing worked.

Finally to test if my firmware was correct i grabbed a thumb drive and followed the steps. Rebooted straight into ubuntu and it worked first time. Shutdown, removed the thumb drive and inserted the external enclosure (which had a clean flash of 20.04.1 and script run from my earlier tests), rebooted and it booted into ubuntu with no issues.

I have absolutely no idea why this worked but here i am.

Thank you for the fantastic walkthrough!