possibility of transferring the system in a USB Hard Disk

[cofot28]

Hi!
It’s with great pleasure that I use almost exclusively Moode for listening to music. The latest 6.7.1 release brought further compatibility and stability.

Concerning future upgrades, I find that the use of the microSD card for loading the system represents (at least for me) the main issue. This is because an audiophile fanless pi4 is getting quite hot and sooner or later the sd card is dead. In addition, changing the SD card in a boxed pi (for a different use) is a real pain requiring in most cases special tools. Last but not least, if someone wants to accommodate a lot of high-resolution music files in a single media together with the system this is not possible given the limited space of the reasonably priced sd cards.

Now my million dollar question: Would it be technically possible (as in the case of Volumio) to see one day in Moode the possibility of transferring the system in a USB connected Hard Disk and get rid of the micro SD after installation?

Thanks for considering this question.

[Tim Curtis]

Raspberry Pi has supported Booting from USB drives for a few years now. You just write the image to a USB stick instead of an SDCard. IIRC not all USB sticks are recognized by the Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentatio...des/msd.md

The Pi 4 apparently requires an updated firmware to boot from USB device.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentatio...torageboot

And there is now an official Raspberry Imager.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Note, I haven't tried the new imager or firmware update on a 4.

[TheOldPresbyope]

@cofot28

Booting moOde from a USB thumbdrive works fine for me on an RPi3B+ and has for quite some time. 

The thumbdrive is detected by Etcher when I plug it into my Linux laptop. If I select it, the flashing process proceeds just as it would for a uSD card but there's no uSD card involved at any point.

I haven't yet done this with an HD or an SSD because I need to figure out how to organize a three-partition system such that I can flash partitions 1 and 2 from Tim's release and keep partition 3 for music. This would require some modest modification of moOde to recognize the third partition and some protection of the third partition during the flashing process.

Like Tim, I haven't tried booting from mass storage with an RPi4B yet. So many fun things to do; so little time. The moOdeOS running on a USB 3.0 SSD would be wicked fast.

Regards,
Kent

[cofot28]

@cofot28

Booting moOde from a USB thumbdrive works fine for me on an RPi3B+ and has for quite some time. 

The thumbdrive is detected by Etcher when I plug it into my Linux laptop. If I select it, the flashing process proceeds just as it would for a uSD card but there's no uSD card involved at any point.

I haven't yet done this with an HD or an SSD because I need to figure out how to organize a three-partition system such that I can flash partitions 1 and 2 from Tim's release and keep partition 3 for music. This would require some modest modification of moOde to recognize the third partition and some protection of the third partition during the flashing process.

Like Tim, I haven't tried booting from mass storage with an RPi4B yet. So many fun things to do; so little time. The moOdeOS running on a USB 3.0 SSD would be wicked fast.

Regards,
Kent

I am a bit lost with the 3 partition issue but I keep thinking that the quality of MoodeOS deserves, before anything else, a  path towards SSD booting without entering the command line. I keep hoping...

[TheOldPresbyope]

@cofot28

Booting moOde from a USB thumbdrive works fine for me on an RPi3B+ and has for quite some time. 

The thumbdrive is detected by Etcher when I plug it into my Linux laptop. If I select it, the flashing process proceeds just as it would for a uSD card but there's no uSD card involved at any point.

I haven't yet done this with an HD or an SSD because I need to figure out how to organize a three-partition system such that I can flash partitions 1 and 2 from Tim's release and keep partition 3 for music. This would require some modest modification of moOde to recognize the third partition and some protection of the third partition during the flashing process.

Like Tim, I haven't tried booting from mass storage with an RPi4B yet. So many fun things to do; so little time. The moOdeOS running on a USB 3.0 SSD would be wicked fast.

Regards,
Kent

I am a bit lost with the 3 partition issue but I keep thinking that the quality of MoodeOS deserves, before anything else, a  path towards SSD booting without entering the command line. I keep hoping...

 You can do it now, at least on RPi3B(+) but flashing the existing moOde image will turn the SSD into a two-partition disk with a small (256MB IIRC) FAT32 partition which is the /boot filesystem and a modest (ca 3.4GB) partition which is the /root filesystem. So far so good, except that it also overwrites the disk's partition table as if there's nothing else on the disk. As soon as you choose to expand the root filesystem the expansion routine commanders the entire remainder of the drive. This might be ok for you if the SSD is very small but you'd have to re-transfer any music you had on it before the flashing process.

What I want is to for a SSD or HD to have a third partition which starts at, say, 16GB (an arbitrarily chosen number [1]) and extends to the end of the drive. This partition would contain a filesystem full of music.

Flashing a moOde image should then overwrite the first and second partitions but not the partition table or the third partition. Expanding the "root filesystem" would expand the second partition up to 16GB. The moOde code would have been modified to pick up the third partition as, say, a /mnt/LOCALMUSIC filesystem or whatever makes sense.

Something like that.

Regards,
Kent

[1] the size should be sufficient to support moOde's software update process and the possible addition of some user-created scripts and/or programs.

[Tim Curtis]

We could prolly do that type of partition magic but IME it's never a good idea to put user data on the same media that contains the OS.

[CallMeMike]

...................... snip ........................
Concerning future upgrades, I find that the use of the microSD card for loading the system represents (at least for me) the main issue. This is because an audiophile fanless pi4 is getting quite hot and sooner or later the sd card is dead. In addition, changing the SD card in a boxed pi (for a different use) is a real pain requiring in most cases special tools. Last but not least, if someone wants to accommodate a lot of high-resolution music files in a single media together with the system this is not possible given the limited space of the reasonably priced sd cards.
..................... snip ............................

Heat = the 'silent' killer (you may have a good point... RPi 4 may become a furnace if proper heatsink or heat dispersion is not used)

There is  a simple addon, well... two simple addons, that can help in this respect (and can solve the access to the micro SD card port within the RPi in the case of using a desktop enclosure):
- Micro SD to Micro SD Extension Cable
- Micro SD to SD Extension Cable

[TheOldPresbyope]

We could prolly do that type of partition magic but IME it's never a good idea to put user data on the same media that contains the OS.

I don't disagree. Any mistake on the part of the user and their music partition is toast. Most packaged NAS systems I've tried keep the media disk(s) separate for the same reason.

In addition to the safety factor gained by using a separate boot/root card, there's the convenience factor of being about to move it between computers for flashing, testing, etc. (ETA - I suppose one can argue this is true for a larger USB HD/SSD as well.) This item already can be a thumbdrive rather than a uSD card.

But, hey, this is DIY. If a user wants a double-edged razor they can have one. They just don't get to complain about any accidental blood letting

Regards,
Kent

[differentieel-audio]

TheOldPresbyope pid='24710' dateline='1600168819']    

We could prolly do that type of partition magic but IME it's never a good idea to put user data on the same media that contains the OS.

I don't disagree. Any mistake on the part of the user and their music partition is toast. Most packaged NAS systems I've tried keep the media disk(s) separate for the same 

Agreed to Kent, I take the risc - the 750Gb disk was there on my desk - a good place to store the audio collection - after encountering two SDcards crashing - the Raspbian and moOde fit very well together without a lot of heat - the gear looks like this

[cofot28]

Interesting technical enhancements but I wonder if it's worth to set them as upgrate teasers since all these manipulations offer practically no improvement to sound quality which is already great. Instead I would propose more emphasis to practical issues such as making library search possibilities more flexible.

For instance if someone (perhaps crazy like me) wants to listen to a piece of Classical music (composed by many tracks) within a library of 2000+ albums he finds himself either in a track search mode or in searching albums by artist (not composer). So far, the practical solution I found is to use uPnP renterer and access my tailor made foobar interface and foobar library from my pc. I don't hear any degradation in sound quality with this solution, but even if there is one it should be insignificant.

Another reason pushing me to this foobar-moode combination relates to tags. Many albums, mostly  in dfs (but not all of them) and some flacs of high sampling rates, refuse to show up correctly in Moode menus while they are ok with foobar and other players. I also tried to address the issue with tag editors such as mp3tag without any success.

Last but not least  for future upgrades I come back with this idea of providing an easy path from sd card to ssd (without the use of  the command line) to all those who want to install the whole thing in a speedy and much safer ssd.


Again many thanks for what you have done so far!