I
received a piDrive Hardware (www.gungho.io) through
the Kickstarter Campaign and purchased a 120 GB mSATA SSD. The setup process
worked like a charm - no error message, really easy. Unfortunately, after the
reboot the Raspi won't come up any more. So I had to recreate the PiDrive
Installer quicker than I originally thought. No idea what went wrong during the
initial procedure. I figured that the SSD was partioned with 2 x 8GB although a
specified "Use entire Disk" - strange. Nevertheless, it worked the
second time smoothly. Below a write up of the steps.
UPDATE FOR Raspberry 3
If you are running a Raspberry 3 you may experience that the provided piDrive installer won't boot. To my knowledge there are two options around it:
a) if you have a working setup on RP-2 you can just move over the storage (SD & SSD) to the new device and boot. This worked for me fine.
b) if you start from scratch with the piDrive installer - it might not work. In my case nothing happened. I had to but up with a stock rasping image and had to apply the steps described here:
https://learn.adafruit.com/external-drive-as-raspberry-pi-root?view=all
This is also rather simple to do.
Download
the latest Raspian:
I took
the latest Jessie version from here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
No need
to unzip as the process later on will require the ZIP file. This not part of
the creation process for the installer, however - with this version, the setup
was working. During the failed approach I used an older version of Raspian (may
be this was part of the problem).
Download
the piDrive Installer:
It is a
little bit hidden on the web site. To find the latest version - go to gungho.io
-> Support -> Make Your own piDrive installer. Link is located in the
"Getting Started" section. I used this installer:
Format
the Disk
Format
the disk to FAT 32. You may use an application called "SDFormatter"
from sdcard.org. Needless to say that formatting erases anything that was on
the SD card before.
Unzip the
Installer
In the
Downloads Directory:
unzip
pidrive-installer-v0.2.img_zip
Transfer
the Image to the SD Card
Step 1: Find the Proper Device
With
diskutil in a terminal window you should first obtain a list of drives and
identify the correct one:
diskutil
list
The list
includes the system drives as well. You may identify the SD by size and by the
DOS_FAT_32 format. It is essential to pick the right one. Continuing with the
wrong disk is most likely a disaster.
Step 2: Unmount the Disk
Take the
identifier from the list in step 1 and unmount the disk:
diskutil
umountDisk /dev/disk2
Step 3: Transfer the image to the SD Card
Apparently
the following command only works in the same directory where the img file is
located. Note that you have to adjust the disk. It is intentional that the
device is "rdisk" and not "disk" as listed above:
sudo dd
bs=1m if=pidrive-installer-v0.2.img of=/dev/rdisk2
Step 4: Eject the SD Card
The newly
written SD should appear in the Finder. Use the Finder to eject it.
Now you
should have a piDrive Installer for Raspian Images.
Helpful
Hints
If you
want to verify the installation after you went through the piDrive installation
procedure in the browser and before rebooting after the setup procedure has
finished, you may want to log on to the raspi:
Host:
|
piDrive.local
|
User
|
root
|
Password
|
Pidrive
|
The /tmp folder contains the log file of the installation.
You may
initiate a gentle restart by "reboot".