Introduction

Use a SSD instead of SD card for a Raspberry PI 4 on Archlinux ARM

Change bootorder while on RPI

Add BOOT_ORDER=0xf41 with the following command to adjust the boot order:

$ sudo rpi-eeprom-config -e

Running:

$ sudo rpi-eeprom-config

should print something like this:

BOOT_UART=0
WAKE_ON_GPIO=1
POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=0
BOOT_ORDER=0xf41

Backup partion table

$ mkdir stuff
$ cd stuff
$ sfdisk -d /dev/sda > part_table_sd_card

Create images

Now we create images of the boot (/dev/sda1) and root (/dev/sda2) partion

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=sda1.img status=progress bs=2M                     
411041792 bytes (411 MB, 392 MiB) copied, 28 s, 14.6 MB/s
$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 of=sda2.img status=progress bs=2M
57002688512 bytes (57 GB, 53 GiB) copied, 3978 s, 14.3 MB/s

Restore the partion table to the SSD

$ sudo sfdisk /dev/sdb < part_table_sd_card

Restore images to SSD

$ sudo dd if=sda1.img of=/dev/sdb1 status=progress
$ sudo dd if=sda2.img of=/dev/sdb2 status=progress

Change some stuff needed to boot from SSD

Mount SD partions temporary

$ mkdir boot root
$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 boot
$ sudo mount /dev/sdb2 root

Change configs

Change root= to /dev/sda2

$ cat boot/cmdline.txt
root=/dev/sda2 rw rootwait console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 fsck.repair=yes

$ cat root/ets/fstab
# Static information about the filesystems.
# See fstab(5) for details.

# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
/dev/sda1  /boot   vfat    defaults        0       0

Boot from USB 3

If you want to boot your SSD via USB 3, I had to adjust this boot parameters in boot/cmdline.txt

Get the idVendor and idProduct of USB SATA adapter

Plug it in, call dmesg. At the bottom, there should be the following output:

[    2.461535] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=1561, bcdDevice= 2.04
[    2.461566] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[    2.461587] usb 2-2: Product: SABRENT
[    2.461603] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: SABRENT
[    2.461619] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: DB9876543214E

The important part are the values of idVendorand idProduct in line 1.

Add usb-storage.quirks=$idVendor:$idProduct:u to kernel command line. For me this should result in:

$ cat boot/cmdline.txt
usb-storage.quirks=152d:1561:u root=/dev/sda2 rw rootwait console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 fsck.repair=yes