Re: HOWTO: USB boot on 8 GB RPi4 with no SD card

[Paul Mather <bsd-lists%gromit.dlib.vt.edu@localhost>]

On Jul 28, 2020, at 4:27 PM, Ted Spradley <tsprad%talent-free-studios.com@localhost> wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 14:43:14 -0400
> Paul Mather <bsd-lists%gromit.dlib.vt.edu@localhost> wrote:
> 
>> The April firmware is not recent enough.  You need to change to the
>> "stable" channel to get an EEPROM firmware version that will boot
>> without the SD card present.  You are using the "critical" channel.
>> (See "Changing the firmware release" in
>> https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/booteeprom.md)
> 
> Thanks, Paul. I'm making progress now. At least it's now looking at my
> USB memstick, but it says that start4.elf is not compatible.
> 
> pi@raspi4:~/BSD/NetBSD/boot $ sha1sum start4.elf
> 26d26d9778e192858095c60fca1e3f4d32142fcd  start4.elf
> 
> That's what's in
> https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/download/v1.17/RPi4_UEFI_Firmware_v1.17.zip
> 
> I'm still doing something wrong. Do I need to try to rig up a serial
> console so I can capture the boot messages?


The SHA-1 checksum of my start4.elf is the same as yours:

arq ~# shasum /boot/start4.elf
26d26d9778e192858095c60fca1e3f4d32142fcd  /boot/start4.elf

This is what I have in my /boot partition on the external USB MSD drive:

arq ~# ls -al /boot
total 8628
drwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    16384 Dec 31  1979 .
drwxr-xr-x  25 root  wheel      512 Jul 23 14:58 ..
drwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     4096 Jul  8 04:14 EFI
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  2031616 Jul 14 16:05 RPI_EFI.fd
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     4592 Jul 14 15:57 Readme.md
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    47413 Jul 14 16:01 bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel      162 Jul 16 13:13 boot.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel      241 Jul  8 17:42 boot.cfg-orig
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel      206 Jul 14 15:57 config.txt
drwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     4096 Jul  9 01:57 dtb
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     5409 Jul 14 16:00 fixup4.dat
drwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     4096 Jul  8 01:57 overlays
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  2277248 Jul 14 16:01 start4.elf


I use a serial console but I don't think you have to.  If you see the large black and white Raspberry Pi logo on your monitor then you know the system has at least managed to boot the UEFI/ACPI firmware in RPI_EFI.fd.

Do you still have an SD card present?  The default BOOT_ORDER of 0xf41 will try and boot from SD card before it tries from the external USB MSD drive.  It may be that if you have an SD card in the slot that is not correctly formatted then you'll get complaints from the EEPROM?

With my current EEPROM version, if I want to boot Raspberry Pi OS I just start up with the SD card with it on present in the slot.  When I want to boot NetBSD I just start up with the SD slot empty.

Cheers,

Paul.