Raspberry Pi: Moving !Boot to another drive (Rev #1)

Introduction and rationale

By default, RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi has !Boot on the SD card, along with the boot loader partition. This is a low-cost way of providing the necessary storage, but there are drawbacks.

Having !Boot on the SD card means that the SD card will see lots of writes (thanks largely to the presence of !Scrap inside !Boot). An SD card was designed for use by devices such as digital cameras which would be writing a series of (say) 2MB files rather than the 1kB (or smaller) blocks being written by Filecore: this can result in the SD card performing substantially more write operations than expected.

Also, the SD card does not understand Filecore format so does not know when a file has been deleted: this means that the wear levelling algorithms won’t work properly, leading to a reduced operating life.

In summary, you can improve SD card longevity by moving !Boot somewhere else.

Caveats

If the new boot disc is connected by USB, it must be the only disc drive attached at boot time. This is because RISC OS looks for !Boot by drive number not drive name, and drive numbers could change following a reboot (the first disc to start up gets the lowest drive number). If you have more than one drive attached, they could start up in any order and RISC OS could look for !Boot on the wrong drive.

Procedure

1. Use !HForm to format the chosen device (e.g. SCSI::4) to Filecore format
2. Copy !Boot to the root directory of the chosen device
3. You will probably want to copy the other directories (Apps, Utilities etc.) as well.
4. Press F12 and issue the following two commands:
   *configure filesystem SCSI
*configure SCSIFSDrive 4
5. Reboot.

Remember that you must retain !Boot.Loader on the SD card, but you can get rid of everything else once you are sure that the system is using !Boot on SCSI::4. Indeed, some people go the whole hog and replace the SD card with a FAT32-formatted card containing only the files copied from !Boot.Loader.