Starting a new project and thought I’d blow the dust off the Raspberry PI 3B. The last project, a temperature and humidity monitor, died due to the SD card coming to the end of it’s life. With this in mind, I was keen to find an alternative solution which minimised or removed the need for an SD card.
I tried many different USB drives but struggled to get the USB hard disks to boot. I just got a red light and nothing. I managed to get the PI to boot from a USB key but it wasn’t what I wanted.
Solution : I found this post which made for a very simple 2 step solution.
1. Copy bootcode.bin only to the SD card
2. Deploy the Raspbian image to your hard disk using Etcher
What happens is that the bootcode.bin on the SD card starts the boot sequence, much like BIOS does on a normal PC, and then boots from the USB Hard Drive.