Raspberry Pi does what Microsoft can't!

if i buy a pc without windows pre-installed i have to either copy windows installer to a flash drive from another computer or install windows from a special image server on my network that is assuming i want to run windows in the first place but guess what this little raspberry pi it can set itself up without any flash drive directly over the internet using a new feature called network install like apple's internet recovery you don't have to have any os installed on your computer to use it and you don't need to run a separate server to boot your pi and image its drive now one thing i have to make clear right away because i know you're going to comment on it this feature is not net booting the pi supports that too this is similar in a sense but this actually goes deeper what this new feature means is you could walk into a store buy a raspberry pi in any old micro sd card go home plug it into your network and the pi could set itself up sort of i mean you might not be able to find a new raspberry pi anywhere right now and since the features in beta it's not actually running on existing pies unless you update their firmware but soon once it's out of beta that'll be possible and heck you can't even do that on macs their internet recovery feature is only possible because apple burns that into storage that's soldered onto the mac on the pie you can use any storage you want you can just set up a pie with a thumb drive no other computer required this new feature is also cool because at this point you can boot a pi in a bunch of different ways you can boot from sd cards or built-in emmc on the compute module you can boot from any usb drive like flash drives hard drives or ssds you can net boot using pxe boot you can even boot compute module fours from nvme ssds and now you can boot a pi directly over the internet using this network installer mode pretty cool but seeing is believing first i'll show you how to update your existing pi to be able to do network install you have to have a pi4 pi 400 or compute module 4 though older pi's don't have the eeprom that makes this possible the eeprom is inside this tiny chip here i actually did a whole video on how the pi4 boots itself up using the eeprom so go check that out if you want the gory details and i do mean gory while this features in beta you actually do need another computer to update your pi's firmware which is ironic because the whole point of the feature is to not require another computer but it is what it is on my mac i opened up raspberry pi imager then i clicked choose os in the pop-up scroll down to misc utility images and click on it then click on beta test bootloader and in that menu click on the sd card boot then pop a micro sd card into your card reader and choose it with choose storage click right then enter your password when prompted since the software needed to flash the firmware is pretty tiny this should be pretty fast now pop out the microsd card insert it into your pi then boot up the pi ideally with a monitor connected the activity led should start flashing pretty rapidly what's interesting about this is the pattern of flashes is actually indicating individual bytes being written to the eeprom in real time once that's done the green led starts flashing in a steady pattern and if you have a monitor plugged in it should show a green screen meaning that the flashing was successful unplug the pi and take out the microsd card and at this point you're running the beta bootloader and it should be able to do a network install make sure you have a keyboard and ethernet cable plugged in and pop in a micro sd card that doesn't already have pios or any other operating system on it if you want to use the same microsd card used to flash it you can actually do that without even erasing it just pull it out of the pi then do the next few steps and then pop the card back in once pi imager is running but assuming you have a different card or erased your original card it's time to power on the raspberry pi and look at that there's a new fancy looking screen that pops up when the pi doesn't detect an operating system hold down the shift key for a few seconds then when it asks press the space bar after that the network installer will connect to the internet and download the raspberry pi imager to ram the imager download was pretty slow for me and heck right now it doesn't even work with ipv6 but hopefully those things will get fixed before it gets out of beta anyways once that download's finished the same old raspberry pi imager we all know and love boots up from ram and you can flash the micro sd card straight from the pi itself and you know what i thought was really cool about this you don't even need a mouse every part of the interface can be reached just using the keyboard the advanced configuration takes a bit of tabbing but i love that because i don't always have a mouse nearby and right now the installer isn't actually accessible for blind users but according to raspberry pi they might integrate orca so assistive devices could work with the imager's ui anyways select an os select the micro sd card and hit right then watch as the pi simultaneously downloads and writes the image to your card how much ram you have on your pi shouldn't be an issue even if you choose a big os image because the image is actually decompressed and written straight through to the micro sd card once it's done writing the pi will automatically reboot and since there's an operating system on the card now the pi should boot from it now what about usb flash drives and ssds well i have a t-cell 4k fire flash drive that a viewer sent in and i've been meaning to test it out on a pie so now's as good a time as ever i'll shut down the pi pull out the micro sd card plug in the usb flash drive and power up the pi again and after holding down shift then pressing space and waiting for the imager to start up it looks like the usb flash drive is also selectable i flashed it and after that finished the pi rebooted off it without any problems that's awesome one other thing i wanted to try out though what if i had a custom pios image like a retropie build or some other os i wanted to install that i couldn't get to through the imager's defaults could i just put an image file on a usb flash drive pop that into the pi and flash it to my card yes in fact i can i tried it out and when i chose the use custom option in the operating system menu it showed all the image files on my flash drive i should mention i formatted my flash drive as fat32 i'm not sure if it'll work with other formats but this makes it even more powerful in addition to being able to set up a pi from scratch anywhere with an internet connection i could carry around a flash drive with my favorite os's and flash them to the pi 2 all without having another computer this is all great but one question i've been hearing a lot is how secure is it well for anyone who's really really concerned about it i'd recommend never installing something direct over the internet regardless you should always use local images you've independently verified but for most users the security in place is adequate the imager that runs in the pi's ram is verified using a self-signed certificate that raspberry pi created and it looks like the cert that they're currently using is valid for about 24 years and the imager itself is signed with a separate key so it can be verified before the pi boots it once rebooted the imager actually fetches the current date and time over the web not using ntp but using http since it needs to have a somewhat accurate time and date so the image downloads will work correctly is the end to end security absolutely bulletproof no but it's good enough for me also since i know some of you will ask the source code that actually builds the raspberry pi imager build root image that makes this all work is up on github in the imager project's embedded directory there are a few other limitations with the current network install process some people are asking about fully headless automated provisioning that's actually been possible on the compute module 4 for almost a year now but right now at least it still requires extra steps if you want to try to do that on a pi 4 or pi 400 also you can't do any of this stuff over wi-fi for now the pi's eeprom is already a bit space constrained i've been told that's part of the reason they can't add sata boot to the compute module 4 yet so adding more code to support wi-fi in addition to ethernet for network install might be impossible at least with this current generation of raspberry pi's and what about the compute module 4 updating its boot loader is a little more complicated because its eeprom works a bit different on the cm4 you need to use the rpi boot tool to flash the beta boot motor finally i also wanted to point out two features on the raspberry pi that can come in handy when you mess around with the eeprom you can check your current config with rpi eeprom config and edit it using the dash dash edit option or run sudo raspy config go to advanced options then boot order if you just want to change the boot order on the pi it's great raspberry pi is adding this feature i think back 10 years ago when apple released ios 5 for the iphone sure there were big new features like icloud and imessage but the biggest update the one that took the iphone from a glorified ipod to the behemoth that it is today that feature was independence from itunes with ios 5 you could activate and update iphones without ever connecting them to another computer i think once network install is out of beta a major barrier to first-time pi owners will disappear they won't have to set it up from another computer and heck it works well enough that i'll be using it a lot now too but power users like me will still use imager on another computer but i think for many people this new way of setting up a pie might be the only way they ever do it if you try it out and find a problem though there's a forum topic where raspberry pi is asking for feedback also i mentioned at the beginning of this video that this feature isn't the same thing as netboot that's a different beast and wendell over at level one text just posted a thorough blog post covering netbooting a raspberry pi so check that out if you're interested i plan on covering it in a future video too so be sure to subscribe until next time i'm jeff gearling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 630,264

Keywords: raspberry pi, microsoft, windows, apple, internet, recovery, install, network, rebuild, flash, usb, external, nvme, startup, build, computer, sbc, usability, ux, first-time, setup, imager, image, pi os, raspbian, retropie, ubuntu, arch, linux, iso, drive, ssd, hard drive, cm4, compute module, pi 400, feature, new, eeprom, bootloader, beta, initialize, disk utility, media, eep, wild

Id: qlBIfpBwqKY

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/echo4thirty]

The issue is finding one. It infuriates me that scammy sellers on ebay are selling $5.00 pi zeros for 85-150.00

[u/lumpynose]

The title of the video strikes me as click bait; it seems to me that it's not Microsoft that "can't do it" but the motherboard makers, specifically whoever makes the bios on the motherboards. And I vaguely recall reading that there's some standard that the bios makers follow so that standard would probably need changing.

[u/swn999]

One day when there are pi 4/5 boards available I’ll do it :)

[u/[deleted]]

This is a hardware feature not an OS feature. If you buy any recent Dell, for instance, you can redownload and reinstall the image directly from their servers using their firmware.

[u/entered_bubble_50]

Even here in the UK, where at least some of the Pis are manufactured, it's impossible to get hold of one. I just checked every one of the official suppliers, and they are completely sold out of all models. Crazy.

The only thing that's available atm is the pico. So I guess it's time to get into microcontroller based projects?

[u/Xicadarksoul]

Mother of all security holes!

[u/dgsharp]

Am I the only one bothered by him pronouncing EEPROM as “eep-rom” instead of “ee-prom”? Probably so…

Tongue-in-cheek emoji