Over at Adafruit, Brennen Bearnes has written a great tutorial and helper script that will enable you to use an external drive as a “root partition”. This means that although your Pi still boots from the SD card, thereafter everything else is handled by the external drive. He’s used a full-sized drive here, but I guess the principle works for things like USB pen drives. Read the tutorial here.
A very useful and instructive tutorial, well done. Thank you for sharing that with us.
I will be implementing this asap with a USB Stick drive.
( Off the topic: I have now some 3 SD’s that will not boot but are formatable and writable/readable under windows format and with SDFormat. The OS is on the card ok but not boot.- multi SDFORMAT’s do not help
For the next version of RPi I’d like a SSD/HDD/USB Boot as well as the SD Card. )
A clear and useful tutorial… it’s works too! Unfortunately, how to safely backup and restore the SD card and the HDD is not addressed. Please will you provide a tutorial on the best way to perform backup/restore.