DietPi: Headless install on Raspberry Pi 5 NVME drive?

General Discussion
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Hi everyone.

I’ve recently aquired a Raspberry Pi 5 along with an NVME drive. The idea is to ditch the SD card, and fully rely on the NVME drive for some extra performance. Since it will be headless, and since the DietPi installation guide doesn’t cover this use case, I’d like to ask a few questions.

  1. In order to install DietPi on an NVME drive attached to a Raspberry Pi 5, I will likely first have to install DietPi on the SD card (a standard, normal installation) and then boot off the SD card. If that’s the case - is it possible to install DietPi from within DietPi itself on an attached NVME drive using ssh, while the Raspberry Pi is in headless mode?

  2. If it is not possible to install DietPi on the NVME drive using a ssh session to the headless Raspberry Pi, then what other options do I have to install DietPi on the NVME drive without having to install a keyboard and a monitor to it?

Again, what I’m looking for is to install DietPi on the NVME drive without having to connect any kinds of keyboards, displays or mice to the Raspberry Pi. I can’t find any documentation on how to do this (or even if it’s possible), so any help is appreciated. Thank you in advance!

1 Like
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I just did it last night on my headless RPI5.
Install DietPi to SD, and used DD command to the nvme drive. Pulled the SD card and ran gparted to use all of the nvme. Took about 15 minutes total.

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You have to simply install DietPI on the SD, run a full apt upgrade and then use RPi-clone tool to clone the microsd to NVMe. Otherwise it won’t boot, read this: Raspberry PI 5 pci boot with nvme, error with 'rpi-eeprom'

PS: use this updated RPi-clone utility https://rpi-clone.jeffgeerling.com/ (the old doesn’t work on NVMe)

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Thanks for this really clear and concise write-up, I was having doubts on whether DietPi would be the right option for this, seeing as the Raspi 5 is showing as “testing” on the main page. It looks like DietPi is gonna be the way to go.

How are you finding it otherwise?

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You’re welcome. DietPI works flawlessly on the 5, I’m using it as a main server for lots of databases/stats (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, ecc). I also saw that in the last months appears some rpi-eeprom updates, so now maybe it can boot straight from an NVMe drive.

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usually regular RPi5 guides should work same way on DietPi NVMe SSD boot with the Raspberry Pi 5 | Jeff Geerling

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