The big news about the Raspberry Pi 3 was built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but it turns out there was another set of new tricks: new boot options. This feature’s still in beta, but over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, they outline how to boot from a mass storage device or over ethernet.




Right now, they’re still working out some quirks, but you can edit a TXT file to enable the new boot modes. This means the Raspberry Pi 3 can boot from a flash drive or a USB hard drive instead of a SD card. This will likely be a little slower than the SD card, but it’s still useful for those of us with tons of extra flash drives sitting around. There’s also ethernet support for network booting built in there too. This is all still in beta and a little unpredictable, but if you don’t mind toying around with experimental features, you’ll find everything you need over on GitHub.

How to boot from a USB Mass Storage Device on a Raspberry Pi 3 | GitHub via Raspberry Pi