What we need to do after you have put the hard drive in its enclosure is to grab the files we need, put them on the MicroSD card, plug in the cables, power is last, boot it with your sd card, follow the wizard’s instruction, plug in the hard drive at a certain point during the wizard so it can format it, reboot, go into the edit menu, add your os’s via the jump drive. That is a huge run on sentence and a 50,000 ft overview. I expect the youtube guide will clear up any questions and then we can move on to the fun part of exploring our system and installing software.
I have to do some work to justify this post so let’s get to the details of the guide. We are starting with the Raspberry Pi 4 and it’s associated cables. We have a drive we will use to act as the hard drive (in my setup it is a literal harddrive). We have a microSD card to hold Berryboot’s Software. This software needs to be on the SD card because that is where the raspberry pi looks to boot from. We will have a jump drive that will hold the extracted OS’s that we will download.
Later our hard drive will be wiped with the berryboot wizard and then after we will use the berryboot software to take the OS’s from our jump drive and install them on the SSD.
I am not sure what magic partitioning berryboot uses to install OS’s onto our hard drive but it feels like a virtual machine with dynamically allocated space. Only it feels much more stable and I think the OS’s are running bare metal. Are Dynamic Partitions used? Is that even a thing? I just realized this is a hole in my knowledge and I need to look into this.
First we format the SD card to Fat32 if it is not already. exFAT won’t work. You can use Windows, Linux, or Mac for this. A quick google of “format sdcard FAT32 (name of your OS, ex Windows)” will find you a tutorial if you never have formated a card.
Download Berryboot from it’s homepage, your correct version will depend on what raspberry pi model you have. Also, download any OS that you want from Alex’s website or the source forge website to multiboot with. These files are in a compressed squash format. Twister OS (32 bit) and a flavor of Ubuntu (64bit) are highly recommended. I also added a Manjaro (64bit arch base) because I have never touched arch distros before and Elementry OS. I have played around with Ubuntu Mate before and I like that also.
Extract(aka unzip) the Berryboot compressed file onto the SD card. You don’t need to flash the files with a program like BelinaEcther. Just copy them over. You can now also extract the OS’s to your jumpdrive. Leave the hard drive alone for now. As long as it has a format of some sort, it is good, and will be recognized and written over.
Note: most people can skip the next paragraph. Some hard drives don’t have a factory format and you will have to use partitioning software to put a format on there. It will end up with ext 4 in the end. Ext 4 is a Linux based format of ancient lore. ;) In other words if the berryboot wizard doesn’t’ recognise a hard drive when you plug it in you may have to take it to Windows for example and partition it with any format just to have Berryboot wipe it again. Important protip, recognize I said, “wipe the hard drive”, twice. If you want data on that harddrive move it somewhere else and put it back on later! I say wipe other tech professionals say nuke and pave. Either way, your date is gone.
You’re going to see the wizard pop up for your first boot from SDcard.
Choose Overscan yes or no based on if you see green borders.
Choose wired or wireless internet.
Set timezone.
Optionally test your keyboard.
It will bring up wireless networks if you choose wifi.
Next, screen is where you select a destination drive. You can choose the sd card, it will look something like mmcblk0: SC32G. Or you can plug in that harddrive now to install to that hard drive. It will come up something like this sda: DISK001. Choose ext 4 and format. Close the error if it shows up. It should not matter. Then choose cancel when it asks to download an OS and reboot. It will bring you back to that download OS from the server and you hit cancel and that will get you into the Berryboot Menu editor. Long press on the add OS button and an option to install from your jumpdrive should appear. Plugin Jumpdrive and Choose your OS images on your jumpdrive and hit open. Repeat for all your OS’s. Now exit and reboot.
You can now choose which OS to boot into. Sign in. The Passwords are on the websites you download the OS from. You should learn how to change your password. Each OS has a different way in settings, or a basic password command in the terminal is the same on all Linux systems. Passwd Linuxtechi.com Password examples
You should now have a working Linux distro or 4 on a raspberry pi 4. Next, I will take you into the world of Raspberry Pi OS. Which is the same but different from the Raspbian OS of the Raspberry Pi 3. Also, Check out my Lost post from last year when I didn’t multiboot but still played with my Raspberry Pi 4. Lots of info and snark. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3