As WD Labs has discontinued support for the PiDrive line and related software, I have released a fully updated community edition of the Foundation (NOOBS) software. This includes Raspbian Stretch and updated firmware for the Raspberry Pi B+ and is fully backward compatible.
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I’ve installed this version. However, once it boots, I cannot find where the HD is. In fact, one time I deliberately deleted the partition on the HD to force it to format on the RPi, but no luck. And nowhere does it ask me whether I want to use sda as the point for the HD. I’m using the 1TB PiDrive.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
TIA, Bill
Hi, Bill. The loader actually assumes /dev/sda. Please create an issue on the GitHub page and I’ll see if I can help you sort it out.
The updated community edition works well on my Pi2 B+ but fails on P1 B+.
I have created an issue on the GitHub page for this.
Later edit:
The latest version of the community edition (pidrive-cfe-20180502) now works well on my P1 B+
Does anyone want to share your working SDcard image for the 3B+ ?
I have a working PI 3B+ sdcard ! Finally after 3 days of reading tons of posts.
Any Helpful hints? Community Editition? NOOBS based or Berryboot?
Sorry to read that the PiDrive products are discontinued, I have PiDrive for more than one year and I wan planing to extend my configuration.
Is there an alternate solution that you may suggest?
Thanks in advance
Robert
You can use standard hard drives with Raspberry Pi as well. The advantage to the PiDrive system was that the drives were designed to use low power consumption. Any traditional hard drive will work, but you will need to make sure you are using sufficient external power. I have built a couple Plex media servers this way and they work well. I use this interface board:
Makerfocus Raspberry Pi X820 2.5 Inch SATA HDD/SSD USB3.0 Storage Expansion Board Kit for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B/ 2B / B+ Amazon.com
There’s also a matching enclosure:
Geekworm Raspberry Pi X820 (X800)… Amazon.com
I hope that helps.
Thanks for the reply.
As far I understand this is only possible with a Pi3, I still have a bunch of Pi2, any idea how to configure them to boot from an USB Drive
Robert
Robert,
You can use the Pi 3 procedure on “some” Pi 2s. There were some Pi 2 boards made with the BCM2837 chip that is used on the Pi 3. Those will work out of the box using the same instructions as the Pi 3 for enabling boot from USB.
Older Pi’s without that chip lack the hardware capability to boot from USB, but there is a workaround for any Linux distro.
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Load a copy of Raspian on both an SD card and a USB drive.
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Boot the Pi (to the SD card).
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Run blkid to determine the PARTUUID of the USB drive.
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Edit /boot/cmdline.txt and change root=PARTUUID=xxxxxxxx to match the PARTUUID of the USB drive.
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Reboot.
The Pi will boot from the SD card, but it will mount the OS root from the USB drive which is effectively the same as booting to it. You will need to keep the SD card in your Pi for this to work and it will not boot any other USB without changing the PARTUUID to match the new drive.
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Nipo,
Many thanks for your information, unfortunately the chip I have are BCM2836, but I will follow your guidelines to configure an USD hard drive.
Thanks again
Robert
Hi
In 2018 the PiDrive Software worked well on my RasPi 2B+.
For a new project I wanted to start with a clean installation, I downloadet and installed the 2019 image - and it didn’t boot.
Looking the unzipped files, I remarked that there are no executable binaries.
So my workaround was:
- Download the actual NOOBS from raspberrypi.org.
- Unzip to a FAT32 formatted microSD card.
- Download the PiDrive Community Foundation Edition from github.
- Unzip the files on the FAT32 formatted microSD card (replace some existing files).
- Boot your Raspberry Pi with a USB storage drive attached.
Hope that helps, best regards
Christopher
Edit:
You have to download the normal NOOBS, not the lite.
With the files of the lite it will boot, but you can’t chose the HD / SSD as target for the installation.
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15 months later, after some hardware and software changes, I preferred to restart a clean installation.
I downloaded the zip-file from github, extracted and copied it to the SD-card, and nothing happened, not even an error!
To prevent that this could be a hardware-failure, I downloaded and extracted the NOOBS-file, and this worked (on the SD. not on the SSD).
I am only an experienced user and not a programmer, but I have the intention that the minimalistic hardware and firmware from the RasPi 2B+ is not able to search executable files in the depth of the file system.
So I copied only the files of the folder “latest” (and its subfolders) from the pidrive-cfe-20190804 to the SD, and it worked perfectly.
This is my workaround, perhaps it helps other people.
Best regards
Christopher
Can’t get it to work on a Raspberry pi 4B is there some sort’ve step by step on how to activate multi OS installation when setting up your Foundation edition of NOOBS for the first time?
I’ve been meaning to create a Wiki over on GitHub with some more information and instructions. I’ll see if I can start getting that put together for you.
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Thanks, would really really appreciate it. Been trying several different methods but haven’t quite gotten it right yet.
