Thanks for the info. I just bought an Argon M.2 case and a 240 GB M.2 SSD. Trying to figure out how to get Astroberry directly on it from Windows. I'd need to get an adapter or install Raspian on the Pi 4 and then burn a copy directly to the M.2 SSD from within Raspian.
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Just download the Astroberry image file, and plug SSD into windows PC and use Balena Ethcer to burn to SSD....simples....

Yes....it will be simples.....I just need an m.2 SSD to USB adapter. Thanks for the help.

Ah... this is what I did... I already had a USB SSD with Astroberry installed:



In any case, you don't need an M.2 adapter, the bottom half of the argon one m.2. is the adapter, you just need a USB cable from the bottom half to your Windows machine.

Why....
Just connect the USB port on the bottom of the Argon case to your windows PC, and flash it that way....

Thanks guys for the info. It'll be easier than I thought. Thanks again.

Hi all! I'm new to all this, and can use all the help I can get! Argon M.2 & RasPi4 was delivered today, and the WD Blue SSD would get delivered tomorrow.
Reading the above comments, I gather I can directly flash my SSD with Astroberry while it sits in the M.2 via usb cable to laptop. It is also recommended above that I fully upgrade the firmware of the RasPi before trying this.
My question is, can I upgrade the firmware without the SD Card? I'd like to have everything on the SSD.

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How to upgrade the firmware without the SD Card?

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You need to boot by a method that your current firmware supports in order to update to a firmware that supports a native SSD boot.
This means that you need and SD card, although you might possibly be able to Network PXE boot from a DHCP / NFS server. (The SD card is the method that would be cheapest and least technically challenging).

Thanks for taking the time to reply! I was able to set it up on my SD Card. Then, moved everything to SSD using the copier. It boots and runs on SSD just fine now.

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Hi Giles - watched your v detailed and useful video with interest. I was booting from SSD successfully until i did a full apt-upgrade a couple of nights ago. Then chaos. I have been through my blkid, /etc/fstab and /boot/cmdline.txt and can see no errors. But when I boot from SSD I get a failed to find target message (after a systemctl rfkill message) then I can't proceed. No way of TTY-ing in. When I alter fstab to point to the SD card for /boot nothing happens at all.

I have quite a bit of material on the SSD which is not backed up for reasons in next para. Can I check and update the firmware on the SSD without booting from it? I can insert the SSD into a linux machine and work off the console.

Reason the SSD was not backed up is that it is larger than my SD. I have a NTFS data partition on the SSD which is not on the SD, even if I offload all the data. The RPi card copier will not image part of a device. I tried a simple dd fi /dev/sda1 fo /dev/sdb1 (and same for the /root partition) to a 32Gb USB, but this didn't appear to work - at any rate i failed to boot from the SSD afterwards.

Any advice you may have will be helpful - atm my only course of action seems to be to reinstall to the SSD from scratch using a fully updated and fw upgraded image, then install gparted to add my data partition again. However, I would be wary of dd'ing the first two partitions again - there must be a better way!

Thanks for any useful words ..

Best
R

Just wondering if you need to use BerryBoot? Astroberry runs beautifully from my SSDs copied on the RPi from the microSD card. Recent updates to the RaspberryPiOS have caused a lot of issues, and if you did a typical sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade, you will have had a lot of these changes introduced into your software. I am sticking with the recently downloaded Astroberry 2.0.4 image, copied over to my SSD, and it seems wise to stay off-line and away from any updates until the ‘mess’ is sorted!