Change boot order on RPi 4

General Discussion
1

Is it possible to change the boot order like it is possbile with raspi-config?
With the config tool you can choose between:

|   B1 SD Card Boot Boot from SD Card if available, otherwise boot from USB    │
│   B2 USB Boot     Boot from USB if available, otherwise boot from SD Card    │
│   B3 Network Boot Boot from network if SD card boot fails                    │

On my current setup I use the SDcard to hold some music files. Whenever I reboot the device I have to take out the card, to be able to boot via USB.

The interesting part of raspi-config looks like this:

 case "$BOOTOPT" in
      B1*)
        if ! grep -q "BOOT_ORDER" $EECFG ; then
          sed $EECFG -i -e "\$a[all]\nBOOT_ORDER=0xf41"
        else
          sed $EECFG -i -e "s/^BOOT_ORDER=.*/BOOT_ORDER=0xf41/"
        fi
        STATUS="SD Card"
        ;;
      B2*)
        if ! grep -q "BOOT_ORDER" $EECFG ; then
          sed $EECFG -i -e "\$a[all]\nBOOT_ORDER=0xf14"
        else
          sed $EECFG -i -e "s/^BOOT_ORDER=.*/BOOT_ORDER=0xf14/"
        fi
        STATUS="USB"
        ;;
      B3*)
        if ! grep -q "BOOT_ORDER" $EECFG ; then
          sed $EECFG -i -e "\$a[all]\nBOOT_ORDER=0xf21"
        else
          sed $EECFG -i -e "s/^BOOT_ORDER=.*/BOOT_ORDER=0xf21/"
        fi
        STATUS="Network"
        ;;
2

What RPi SBC you have?

3

I have a Rasperry Pi 4

4

You can configure the bootloader and set boot order Raspberry Pi Documentation - Raspberry Pi hardware

0xf14 will try USB first, followed by SD then repeat

1 Like
5

For some reason it’s not working, altough it’s set to 0xf14.
If I reboot with the inserted SD card, nothing happens. I also connected a monitor but I have no output since I disabled the HDMI outputs I guess.
I will try again with activated HDMI and see if I can get some useful information.

6

This whole stuff is part of bootloader. Something we don’t manage as it’s the original one from RPI foundation. Did you tried RPI OS? Does it behave differently?

7

Since the RPi 4 is my productive system I can not test with RPi OS. I could try on a RPi 3 but the bootloader works a bit different there.
Since it’s not an important problem I will go with the simplest solution and save the few files also on the USB SSD an remove the SD card.

8

if you are running static ip, you could add your HDD to the RPI3. It should boot up like the original system. This way you get the RPI4 for testing :crazy_face: