Booting Turris Omnia from mSATA SSD⚓︎

Hardware installation⚓︎

1. Ensure that your Omnia isn’t plugged to the power supply.
2. Move the PCIe cards one position to the SIM card slot.
3. Insert your mSATA SSD to the remaining slot (the one which is close to the heatsink (CPU)) as is the only one, which supports also mSATA interface together with mini PCIe.

Device detection⚓︎

1. Plug your Omnia to the power supply.
2. Connect to the router via SSH and log in.
3. Check whether the new SSD can be detected: ls /dev/sd* It should display /dev/sda.

Preparation of SSD⚓︎

1. Backup the current filesystem by creating and exporting a snapshot. See the Schnapps documentation page.
2. Find out the size of the system partition (e.g. via df; the partition is named mmcblk0p1).
3. Install cfdisk if not yet installed:

   opkg update && opkg install cfdisk
   

4. Run cfdisk now:

   cfdisk /dev/sda
   

5. If no partition table exists it asks for a new one (its type should be DOS).
6. Delete all old partitions (if any).
7. Create a new primary partition. Its size must be at least the same as the original (eMMC) partition has (see above). Mark this partition as bootable.
8. Write the changes by Write and leave cfdisk by Quit.
9. Create a filesystem on the new partition:

   mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda1
   

10. Create a mount point a mount the partition on it:

    mkdir /mnt/ssd && mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ssd
    

11. Create a Btrfs subvolume for the root directory:

    btrfs subvolume create /mnt/ssd/@
    

12. Unpack the backup created in step (1) into the new subvolume:

    For example:

    cd /mnt/ssd/@ && tar xzf backup.tar.gz
    

    Note

    Replace “backup.tar.gz” by the real backup file name.

13. Create a symlink to the boot.scr file:

    cd /mnt/ssd && ln -s @/boot/boot.scr .
    

Updating U-Boot to boot from SSD⚓︎

To boot from SSD prepared in previous step, you need to modify the U-Boot environment.

1. Connect to your router via a serial cable.
2. Reboot your the router and immediately press Enter repeatedly until the U-Boot prompt “=>” appears.
3. Run printenv to check how the environment variables are set. Its output should look like:

   boot_targets=mmc0 scsi0 usb0 pxe dhcp
   

4. Set the variables to their new values for the next boot:

   setenv boot_targets scsi0 mmc0 usb0 pxe dhcp
   

5. Try to boot using the new values: run distro_bootcmd.
6. After booting, run the mount command to display what is actually mounted. It should look like:

   /dev/sda1 on / type btrfs (rw,noatime,ssd,space_cache,commit=5,subvolid=257,subvol=/@)
   

7. If it is OK you can repeat the step 4 and then write the environment values permanently by running saveenv.
8. Reboot your router by run distro_bootcmd.

Configuring Schnapps⚓︎

Schnapps expects that your root device is on eMMC. To convince it otherwise, you need to create the configuration file and specify where your root filesystem resides:

1. Connect to you router via SSH and log in.
2. Change the Schnapps configuration by running:

   echo 'ROOT_DEV="/dev/sda1"' > /etc/schnapps/config
   

3. Create the initial snapshot:

   schnapps create "Initial version on SSD"
   

Credits⚓︎

This guide utilizes instructions originally written by drhm on our forum.