General discussion • Re: Replace image from within

PINN does everything required, without having to remove the SD card.

How do you want to supply the replacement or control the replacement? Are you accessing the machine via keyboard, network, VNC, SSH? Does the device have physical space for USB?

It can be done locally via keyboard, or using SSH over the network, installing PINN and requried OSes from a local USB or downloading direct from the internet.

I assume from the general question, you are planning and are not locked into anything. There is one basic roadblock. Your file system is based on Ext4 and you cannot replace the partition while booted from the partition. You need to boot from somewhere else. That means two partitions on the one storage device or two devices plus a dual boot configuration.

Most OSes comprise 2 or more partitions. Whilst executing from the EXT4 partition, PINN can replace the boot partition with its initrd file system. Then after a reboot, PINN can freely partition and format the rest of the drive to accommodate one or more OSes that can be installed directly from the internet, all without removing the SD card.

Lots of people in the Linux Mint forums dual boot multiple Linux distributions on the one SSD. I have not tested a Pi OS equivalent. If you use a 64 GB microSD and replace it with a 128 GB microSD, you could dual boot. You can then replace the image in the partition you are not booted to.

Take it a step further. Split the 64 GB partition into /, /home/, swap, etc. You can then have multiple partitions for / that are only 20 GB. You could have four OS images on a 128 GB card. Boot to each version as needed. Redundancy in case one fails.

Each OS installed by PINN keeps its own boot & root partitions, rather than sharing them, although it is possible to arrange them similarly and share them if required.

Each variation could be on a different USB device.

Then you have the question of how you start a reboot and how you select a different option when rebooting. How are you accessing and controlling the machine?

PINN provides a GUI interface to select which OS to boot, along with the management options of backing up and restoring or replacing OSes, either locally or remotely via VNC.

Statistics: Posted by procount — Sat Apr 06, 2024 1:01 am

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