Pi4 now supports booting from USB

[brimur]

A couple of weeks ago a beta bootloader was released to allow booting from USB such as an SSD. I upgraded my Pi4 and copied the new .elf files to the boot partition of a clean Retropie install. It booted but does not get all the way so looks like the OS itself needs to support it too. A manual install of Retropie on top of RasPiOS works fine but I was wondering if there are nightly builds of RetroPie that use the latest version of RasPiOS and would have the latest OS to support the firmware?

[toString]

@brimur Hi, I've done exactly the same as you. updated the eeprom, copied the .elfs/.dats, doesn't work. RaspIOS boots fine though.
Did you find any solution? Otherwise I guess we have to wait a few months for retropie to be updated..

[mitu]

@toString The update is for the PI's EEPROM chip, there's no update in RetroPie that will enable USB boot. Check out https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md#usbmassstorageboot on how to update your EEPROM to support USB boot.

[toString]

@mitu Thanks for the reply. Sadly I have already updated the eeprom, and RaspiOS boots from the SSD no problem. But Retropi doesn't. I copied over the latest .elfs/.dats to /boot/ as per another suggestion out there, and it does boot from SSD that way, but it doesn't get all the way into retropi and just kinda gets stuck.
This is why I kinda assumed that maybe Retropie isn't quite up-to-date as the RaspiOS.

I hope I'm wrong (especially as I'm no expert in this) But hopefully someone can either confirm or deny that this process does or doesn't work at the moment..

[mitu]

@toString said in Pi4 now supports booting from USB:

This is why I kinda assumed that maybe Retropie isn't quite up-to-date as the RaspiOS.

You can always update the OS and packages from RetroPie-Setup, or, as indicated in the page mentioned, just run

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

and you should have the latest RaspiOS files.

EDIT: that won't work though if you can't boot the OS, just realized that.

but it doesn't get all the way into retropi and just kinda gets stuck.

So SSD boot works, what's the error and where exactly does it get 'stuck' ? Do you get a command prompt ? What image did you use to install ?

[corezon]

@mitu Basically the problem is that the bootloader now looks for a newer elf and dat files in /boot than what are included with the RetroPie image.

[mitu]

The safest option would be be to install the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite - which should have the USB boot supporting firmware on the/boot partition - on the USB disk, then perform a Manual install of RetroPie. The EEPROM bootloader is already updated, so USB boot should work.