I have no SD writer, can I boot from a simple USB thumbstick?

[snow]

Hi there, Just got Orange Pi 5 8GB and have no idea where to begin.

 

I have a microSD card available, but no writer.  I had the idea to boot from USB thumbstick and then write the SD card using the port on the Orange Pi 5, then I can boot from SD card.

 

Is this possible?

What image and method do I need to follow in order to boot from a simple 32GB USB Sandisk thumbstick?

Thank you!

[schwar3kat]

3 minutes ago, snow said:

Is this possible?

I don't have an Orange Pi 5.  
But for all of my Orange Pi's booting from USB is not possible without first programming the onboard SPI flash, and for that you need to boot from SD card.

I don't know if Orange Pi 5 is different, it has different storage options like NVMe.  The user manual will usually give you details.
 

I Googled it, and it still seems that SD card is needed before other options like USB and SSD.

https://jamesachambers.com/orange-pi-5-ssd-boot-guide/

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/25597-orange-pi-5-boot-from-usb-using-uefigrub/

 

[Efe Çetin]

You can boot from USB. Latest Xunlong uboot support booting from USB but you have to burn rkspiloader image to spi loader using the MASKROM mode since you don't have sd card.

 

You can check https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/1Bre2q0bGgXQuQlYaYDMvwstpvtHLmcgX?usp=share_link to learn how to use MASKROM mode.

[OttawaHacker]

On 1/14/2023 at 4:40 AM, Efe Çetin said:

Latest Xunlong uboot support booting from USB

That is awesome. I checked the github but I cannot find any images. And  thanks for the other links. Do you know if anyone has put together some instructions on how to flash that bootloader to the orange pi 5?

[berin]

You can use the raspberrypi iso burner software to write to an SD card or thumb drive etc.... there are a number of image burning/writing softwares. for different OS's What OS are you using and or have you solved your problem yet?