Assuming you don’t want to go through the trouble of manually configuring your boot partition, just upgrading to 20.10 might be the easiest solution.
sudo dd if= of= status=progress Update your Ubuntu to 20.10Īmbiguity 1: can any existing Ubuntu install be booted from SSD. Then byte-wise copy everything from the SD card into a file. You also need to unmount the drive first. diskutil list # for macOS or lsblk # for Linux If it’s a *nix machine like macOS or Linux, first find out what the SD card’s name is. Turn off your Raspberry Pi and insert the SD card into another machine (probably with a bigger drive than your SD card). Optional but probably really wise to backup your SD card first. The goal is to copy the SD card’s 2 partitions to the SSD. For both the Raspbian OS and Ubuntu, it’s on a separate partition on your SD card or SSD when you flashed your OS card initially.įinally, the second partition on your SD or SSD is the root mount directory for your OS. Then there’s a boot folder which contains the next basic steps like the firmware and Linux kernel etc.
It decides what the boot hardware sequence is. It’s a small 512KB chip on the board itself.
You don’t have to understand Raspberry Pi 4’s boot sequence, but it could help with terminology.įirst, there’s a bootloader which isn’t on your SD card or the SSD. Given the above and given the assumption that you bought your Raspberry Pi 4 before September 2020 and you already have a <20.04 Ubuntu you spent time configuring, this guide is for you.
Raspberry Pi 4 recently started supporting booting from SSD drives directly rather than using a slower, more fragile SD card.Īlthough, there’s a lot of content describing how to create a new system on SSD, it doesn’t seem like there’s a good summarizing article describing how to take your existing Ubuntu install, with all your existing server configurations and files etc, and move that existing install from SD card to SSD. Move your existing Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu install from SD card to USB/SSD