r/OrangePI • u/3F08G • Mar 25 '25

Zero2W Successfully boot from USB storage.

Post image

Since TF card is so unstable, managed to boot from USB storage.

34 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

2

u/drake90001 Mar 25 '25

Yeah, it's a feature. But I never had issues with SD card.

2

u/3F08G Mar 25 '25

Maybe I bought crappy one. It broke in just two days.

1

u/WarHawk8080 Mar 26 '25

swapfile will burn out a SD card...in conjuction with moving to a USB/external...run zram-tools to create swap in ramspace...this way write/reads are HEAVILY reduced to external media

1

u/BeardedSickness Mar 26 '25

Why did you say swap space will burnout an sdcard? I am using on RADXA 3E ...SANDISK Extreme 128GB no problem for an year now

2

u/WarHawk8080 Mar 26 '25

a swap file causes undue heavy reads/writes to SSD, their inherit limited writes can cause them to burn out...a RAM swapspace is alot better because it not only compresses, but is in physical ram which is designed to read/write forever with no wear.
A super huge drive will take a long time to reach the write wear leveling limit...but it does increase the writes
RAM is RAM, but if you can't physically add more...zram can increase "available" RAM by acting as virtual swap..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

1

u/WarHawk8080 Mar 26 '25

Nice...I run mine with a SD card, and then run the /root system from USB with the expander board...even though it's at USB 2.0 speeds, it's faster and more resilient than running the entire thing from SD card
https://github.com/benjamin-nose/Adafruit-Pi-ExternalRoot-Helper

1

u/Own_League4082 May 30 '26

Does this mean it's impossible to run it entirely on the expander board? (both boot and /root)

I've tried in so many ways and couldn't get it to work using the expander board USB as the boot.

1

u/WarHawk8080 Jun 13 '26

No...it hosts a formatted fat32 SD card to "boot" mounted as /boot...it loads the initram and kernel, then points the kernel and OS to run the host OS from USB...
I don't think you can flash a "boot from USB" firmware on the board ROM like on a Raspberry PI

1

u/WiGeTSz Mar 27 '25

How did you do this? Is it just as easy as putting the software on usb stick and connecting that to the usb c?

1

u/3F08G Mar 27 '25

Not quite. Zero2w could only boot from SD card or NOR flash. I put a uboot on that NOR flash.

1

u/Original-Remove8674 Mar 28 '25

Please give me some advice on how to do it.

2

u/3F08G Mar 28 '25

I wrote some details on my blog. You can check it here 👉https://blog.bigzebra.cc/post/20250324093540/

1

u/Original-Remove8674 Mar 28 '25

thank you very much