Boot from NVME SSD for Pi5

Posted under » Raspberry Pi on 29 May 2025

I broke my NVME because I bought a Pi5 without a casing. The NVME was exposed to the elements and long story short, it broke and I can't revive it. The timing was bad because I did not do the usual backup which I normally did because it was a busy period.

So I bought an Argon V3 case which I highly recommend. I bought v2 for my Pi4 before so I know it is a good solid product. There is an optional NVME slot at the bottom and I have a spare 1TB stick which I think is too big for a Pi5 which I will elaborate later.

I booted from an 128gb SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager as usual. I used it for a few days and make some updates and installed my usual stuff. After a while I think an NVME SSD will make things faster and so it is time to migrate the data.

The way the Pi boot is different from Windows or Ubuntu. The key to note is the partition. If you have the same partition and contents, then boot is possible. The weird thing is that Pi uses a win boot partition while an ext4 partiotion for data. You have to follow the exact partition the Raspberry Pi Imager does. To do that we use the DD command. First make an .img from the SD card and then restore it to the NVME.

Target NVME size does not matter as long as it it bigger or same than source. However, 1 TB is too big, because it is hard to make a backup later. 128gb is still big, but it is hard to find a smaller NVME these days.

After losing data, I learnt the hard way a backup strategy is important. 128gb img creation takes a few minutes to complete but it could save you days of suffering in the long run.