Hardware and OS

The mission for the weekend to set up my Raspberry Pi 5 as was an nice exercise filled with a few challenges and learning experiences. Here’s a detailed walkthrough of how I managed to get everything up and running smoothly.

Unpacking and Assembly

The first step was unpacking all the components: the Raspberry Pi 5 board, the frame, the NVMe adapter, and the NVMe SSD. Assembling these parts into a cohesive unit took a bit of tinkering, especially since I initially approached the assembly in the wrong order. One particular challenge was connecting the data flat-cable from the PCIe port to the adapter. After a few attempts and some careful adjustments, everything fit snugly into the case.

Preparing the SD Card

To get the Raspberry Pi 5 up and running, I used the Raspberry Pi Imager tool to create a bootable SD card with Raspberry Pi OS. During this process, I made sure to enable SSH and set up my credentials. This step is crucial for headless operation, allowing me to access the Pi remotely without needing a monitor or keyboard.

Initial Boot and Configuration

With the SD card prepared, I inserted it into the Raspberry Pi 5 and connected the device to my local network using a gigabit Ethernet cable. Powering on the Pi, I waited a few moments for it to boot up. Since I had enabled SSH, I could now access the Pi remotely from my computer.

Cloning the SD Card to NVMe

Once logged in via SSH, the next step was to clone the contents of the SD card to the NVMe disk. I used the dd command to create a bit-for-bit copy of the SD card on the NVMe SSD. This process ensures that the NVMe disk has an exact replica of the operating system and configurations from the SD card.

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4M status=progress

Configuring Boot from NVMe

To configure the Raspberry Pi 5 to boot from the NVMe disk, I needed to modify the firmware settings. This involved editing the boot configuration file to prioritize the NVMe disk over the SD card. After making the necessary changes, I rebooted the Pi. Expanding the Root Filesystem

With the Pi now booting from the NVMe disk, the final step was to expand the root filesystem to utilize the full capacity of the NVMe SSD. I used the raspi-config tool to easily resize the root partition. A quick reboot later, and voila! The Raspberry Pi 5 was fully operational, running smoothly from the NVMe disk with ample storage space.

Conclusion

Setting up the Raspberry Pi 5 with an NVMe disk was an interesting experience. I only used SD cards and USB sticks before. The result is a relatively powerful and efficient setup ready for my k3s and AWX needs.