Does installed image stays on SD card after diet pi install?

Troubleshooting
1

Hi. I have a 1gb sd card and I’m unable to get more right now. I’m wondering if image that I’ve flashed from my PC stays on sdcard or it is removed after dietpi installation.
Thank you

2

About which device are you talking? A Raspberry Pi?

Generally the SDcard to flash the DietPi image onto, is the final system drive. You cannot unplug it, since there is no other drive where the system could have been installed to and boot from :wink:.
It is possible to manually move the root partition of the system to an attached USB stick e.g., when the system is already up and running, but this is not done by default.

There is only one case where the flashed DietPi image is actually an installer: x86_64 EFI

  • If you want to install DietPi on a native x86 PC via EFI boot partition, then it is not possible to directly flash the final image onto the system drive. We packed this image with a CloneZilla installer instead. In this case, after the system got installed (from USB stick I would assume and recommend, not from SDcard), then the installer drive can be removed of course.
3

If I move the DietPi root partition to an attached USB stick on Raspberry Pi 3, do I need to keep original SD card inside the Pi for boot purpose? Or I can remove SD card forever and boot directly from USB stick? It would be an ideal situation for me… Everything on USB stick and no sd card anymore.

I have a raspberry pi 3 that can boot from USB if a Raspbian image directly on USB stick, as it were an sd card (I did the procedure to enable USB boot). But I would like to do the same with DietPi for all the reasons we know very well.

4

I did this a while back and wasn’t impressed. The USB drive was slow and the system broke on an update. If you search this forum you’ll find a post about it.

Maybe things have improved since who knows, but I suspect you’ll still be left with a slow system. I’d say a fast SD card such as Sandisk is the best option.

John

5

Thank you John for your feedback.

I think things improved, I managed to burn the latest DietPi on a USB stick and it is working fine. I do not know if it will work if I will upate DietPi with the next new release, but so far so good.

Installed Kodi, the system looks fast and reliable. I must highlight that I used a Sandisk USB 3.0 pendrive (with a different pendrive, USB 2.0, I got problems and it was slow!).

Nico