possibility of transferring the system in a USB Hard Disk

[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.