I have been trying to get my Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) to boot from an external SSD. The issue is that the SSD uses up too much power, so I need to connect it to a powered USB hub to avoid disconnects. However, it doesn’t seem to boot when any drive required at boot is connected to a USB hub (powered or not). I can mount the drive normally after booting, and it seems to work just fine. When using a usb hub on the latest image, the display just powers off on both HDMI ports right before it would normally show me the login prompt. The system.journal file doesn’t seem to contain anything out of the ordinary, and it’s different every time, so I don’t think it will be of much use. Everything works fine on Raspberry Pi OS, and I can boot my PC just fine from the USB hub. This is driving me crazy. I’ve tried:
- Updating the EEPROM
- Using a different disk
- Using a different USB hub
- Using the config from Installing NixOS on a Raspberry Pi
- Using a different image
- Having the firmware on my SD card and mounting the external drive as my root directory
- Adding the
all-hardware
module to my config (which breaks everything) - Adding these kernel modules to my initrd:
uas
,pcie-brcmstb
,reset-raspberrypi
- Other things I’ve forgotten about
I really hope someone out there can help me with this. It’s my first time having to ask for help on a public forum like this.