Boot Raspberry PI 4 from USB

You will need SD card to boot your PI for the first time. Subsequent boots won’t need SD card.

Download etcher https://www.balena.io/etcher/. If you are using Windows, I found etcher to be more reliable that Raspberry PI Imager.

Download Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) with desktop from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-os/

Use Etcher to write Raspberry PI OS into your SD card.

Boot your PI using the SD Card.

Login using username — pi and password — raspberry

Open a terminal and run following commands

sudo apt upgrade

sudo rpi-update

sudo reboot

After reboot, run the following commands

sudo apt install rpi-eeprom vi -y

sudo vi /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update

Replace critical with beta and save the file. Then continue running following commands

sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/pieeprom-2020-05-28.bin

Replace pieeprom-2020-05028.bin with whatever latest file you see under /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/ folder

You can check the boot loader version using (it should match with the date part of the file name above)

vcgencmd bootloader_version

In order to check boot order

vcgencmd bootloader_config

BOOTORDER=0xF41— 4 is for booting from USB and 1 is booting from the SD card.

With the above boot order, you will still be able to boot from SD Card, if needed as a fallback method.

Now let’s prepare our USB storage. Connect your USB flash drive into one of the USB slots.

sudo apt install piclone -y

Go to Accessories > SD Card Copier

Select Copy From Device as your SD Card and Copy To Device as your USB Flash Drive

Be careful with this action. It is going to erase everything from your USB Flash Drive

Now start the copy process. Once the copy task is over, turn of PI, take the SD Card out and boot the PI from USB Flash drive we just prepared above.

Warning : The steps deals with EEPROM of Raspberry PI. Majority of the cases there won’t be any issues, but there had been reported cases of few damages to PI. These damages are mostly permanent and you wont be able to recover the PI back. However, I have done this couple of times and I never had any issues.