what if i want to erase the sd card first then write an os?
It asked me to quit then reinstall rpi-imager

Is there a way to download the beta boot loader without having to use the Raspberry Pi Imager programme? It really annoys me that it changes my file allocations such that any file ending .gz will open in Raspberry Pi Imager, rather than my archive software.

Can I used same Raspberry Pi 4 with with 4/8GB that I brought 3 yrs ago?

How does this interact with the existing network boot support?

If only one could buy a Raspberry Pi to try this on! I had had my four on order since mid-January, scheduled for delivery end of March. Yikes!

Everything worked fine except the screen resolution. Both my computer screen and a small 7″screen could not work out the full screen. I could only see the top left corner about 60% of the total screen as shown in the screenshot here. Any suggestions are welcome. Do I need to go to diagnose screen first maybe?

Is there a way of getting this to work headlessly, without a monitor and keyboard?

Is it possible to use a proxy or can I change the default image server?

would https://fw-download-alias1.raspberrypi.com:443/net_install/boot.img url be ever replacable?

Will this be able to install to USB, or is this sd card only?

Is the image you pick to write limited by the amount of memory, i.e. does the whole image (+Imager) need to fit in memory completely before it is written? I wonder because the largest images wouldn’t fit in 1 GB. That does seem like a logical limitation but it would be ultra awesome if you found a way to dynamically load+write!

Is it possible to specify a proxy server and port so I can run this in a school / corporate network?

It’s a cool feature, but does the bootloader verify authenticity of the downloaded OS image? This is an absolute must-have feature in my opinion.

Would it be possible to add an override shift/key combination that downloads and runs the imager even if the SD card / USB drive etc does contain a bootable OS, without attempting to boot first? As, if your card already contains an OS and you didn’t have another computer to erase it, surely you’re out of luck at present?

It is awesome and really needed! Only thing I found is that in the settings while setting up a SSH account the password is white and thus you cannot see how many characters you’re writing. Other than that its just awesome, keep up the good work!

It’s almost perfect, all we need is to be able to do it headlessly. Like, if it doesn’t detect monitor or something, we’d just be able to SSH into it and do it through there.

Just tried it with a 2G Pi 4 (Model b03111) with a 1280 x 1024 monitor and a wireless connected keyboard/mouse.
Everything went smoothly, apart from a short senior moment pressing shift when the screen was clearly telling me to press space to confirm!

Great firmware update for recovering usability. Worked well

I can see how this will replace NOOBS.

Flawless. Thank you. Handy enhancement.
Please carry on, as it makes a difference at this side of the screen.

P.S.- Congrats for the 64b OS.

I would love if this could be extended to an actual provisioning system, where I could boot a new Pi headlessly with a fresh SD card and have it install a specified image with no user interaction required.

Something like how most VoIP phones work where a DHCP parameter can provide a server URL that then contains config files identified by MAC address or serial number would be nice.

Not directly related to the boot option, but could Pi Imager on PC and Mac be updated to allow backing up an SD card to an image file, removing the free space from the image?

This sounds really awesome! Do you have plans to make this accessible for someone who is blind such as myself? I’m not sure how feasible it would be to get Orca running in the live environment, so maybe SSH from another computer would work better, though it defeats the purpose of using the Pi on its own. Still, I like the idea of not needing to do any work on another computer and would be very happy to settle for command line remote control.

A great concept, just tried this on my RPi4 Model B 1GB RAM model, it downloads the imager OK but when the download appears to be finished it fails to run with the error “An error occurred, please try again, Press and hold key to start install process”
I have tried this five times now, fails at the same point, with the same error message, I removed the blank SD Card on the final test but still have the same failure. This RPi4 is one of the first ones that we could purchase in Australia, the Copyright message on the PCB is 2018 with a IC: 20953-RPI4B

Only issue I’m having is not caused by your software, but by my flaky ISP issued Ethernet MoCA / WiFi Extender that has 2 GbE ports on it. Even on my desktop computer the connection takes a LONG TIME to bring up. Once it’s up it’s fine until the connection resets from a restart or a shutdown. It looks like when the Raspberry Pi completes the download for the Firmware based imager, the connection is reset between the firmware downloader and the imager. That’s causing an issue with my flakey network gear because it means it’s not downloading the available OSs and the Choose OS list for me is blank except for two items. If I wait (2 minutes) before entering that menu, I then get the download list as the connection is reestablished. It would be nice to have a little icon somewhere on the screen denoting if there is a successful ethernet connection established so I know how long to wait. I’m sure this would be helpful for other people too who may have unreliable ethernet.

This talks about ethernet but I’m curious if it’s possible to do this over wifi as well. I don’t know much about network booting/installing but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to have it able to search for an ssid and prompt for password

Worked perfectly on CM4 with CM4IO board booted to PCIe SSD, flashed on board emmc. Love it. Can now copy it back to SSD if required. Good work team

Hi dear
How are you today ?
we used raspberry-pi4, which is RASPBERRY-PI CM4008032 Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, BCM2711, ARM Cortex-A72, 8GB RAM, 32GB EMMC with Raspberry Carrier Board
But This is not supported by Driver in Raspberry OS.
Has anyone used the AC-8260 Wifi module in the above environment?
Unfortunately, we cannot use a module Wi-Fi in the Raspberry .
If you have experience using Wi-Fi, please contact us.
[email address redacted]

It is great feature. Something I was looking for remote mgmt. So far I do not have access with pikvm remote. My guess is that problem is with “Raspberry Pi now also looks for a connected keyboard”. If someone has success with pikvm please let me know. Continue with testing. If that works, it would be complete remote management :-)

You could add a feature to the desktop RPi Imager, so it could connect to a network connected, SD Card less pi.

Just a few things to say about the latest update to the Raspberry Pi bootloader, I used a Pi P400 to test this out, first time I have tried it, started with two blank SD cards, one for the bootloader update and one for the OS install, (I selected the new 64 bit OS later),
Absolutely fabulous, Flawless, seems so flexible, started at about 9:40pm and the installation was completed and running the 64 bit OS by 10:15pm.
Brilliant, tremendous work. Many Thanks. Alec.

Can we please, please have an option to only image something like the first 8 GB of an SD card? Allowing for keeping a persistent “data” partition across upgrades and re-images? If not with this network bootloader, via other official means (Raspberry Pi Imager, etc.)?

We must duplicate a ton of PI image SD card for Pi 3B+. But this solution not support. Any suggest , please welcome or we have to our hard work as usual. :)

Worked a treat for installing straight to SSD. Excellent job :-)

When will there be wifi availability?

Worked flawlessly on my RPi 4 4GB. As an added twist, my boot drive is a 500GB M.2 NVMe plugged in via USB in an Argon ONE M.2 case. Left the USB adaptor for the M.2 case-half unplugged until network boot had initiated, plugged it in at the stage where it asked for a network connection, and it detected and overwrite the old Raspberry OS instance on the drive with zero issues.

Awesome work folks!

I tried this out om my pi4 which had developed problems booting off an SD made on my PC.
The whole process, including loading-up the 64bit version of PiOS on to an SSD went very smoothly.

everyone went smooth. I would like to see the background where you enter in your network password to show some black dots. Having only white on white was confusing. I don’t see this as a huge security risk to show dots representing the placeholders for your wifi password.

Will this work on a CM4 Module with or without eMMC?

RPI default servers always give me “connection failed” so i seriously doubt this network install will work
Better idea would be to give rpi a good old fashioned bios.
Besides my rpi 3 model be proved to be too slow for any thing useable.

I’m having trouble getting the network boot image to load. I’m using a RPi4 2GB.
The firmware update appears to have been successful, and I do the long shift and space bar bit. However, the download of the boot.img is problematic. It starts but is very slow – a maximum of 20 KBps, and down to 10 KBps. Then at around 9Mb download (or less), the transfer stops and simply reports: “An error occurred, please try again”. There is nothing particularly interesting (to me) on the diagnostics screen. I’ve tried two ethernet cables, and different router ports but the effect is the same.
I did a “curl ” at the command line on another pi, and the 22Mb downloaded in 3seconds (!) which is consistent with our internet speed.
Thanks for any suggestions? (Screen images available – just not sure how to add them to the text here).

Can’t seem to get registered for the blog so I’ll post here. When configuring image customizations the SSH password field doesn’t fill in with any characters and when booting the new ssd card the password is neither the default or the customized password. Somewhat minor but appears to be a bug.

What would be really great is if the boot code could download a kernel that was fully network enabled so that it didn’t need local storage at all. Have all the o/s files served across NFS or similar.

I love it!
what also would be a nice option is to LUKS encrypt the sd card!
Keep up the good work :-)

So this appears (or was suggested) this is doing HTTP boot, which existed in the custom rpi4-uefi firmware, but having that ofc needed the SD always there so having this in the bootloader is awesome.

But will it ever be possible to use other image URLS? I’m assuming this is currently hardcoded, but it would be nice if we could point it to a different http boot host…

And on that not other than tftp I’ve I have a HTTP Boot server setup, would the bootloader now support it too?

I would really like to know if it works with the Pi Touchscreen. It would be great for setting up an SD flashing station for our team as the image could be on an SD card and it could be used with the touchscreen to select and flash the image.

I skimmed the instructions two weeks ago and thought I had them down. Killed an hour last night trying to get it to work. Every time I tried to boot the firmware image, I got no green LED – just steady red. Tried a bunch of things and was pretty sure I had bricked the Pi.
Then I reread the instructions. Turns out that it’s for the Pi 4 and 400 only. I had been trying on a 3B+. Good news, I burned an OS using RPi Imager on a Win machine and it booted right up so I hadn’t toasted the 3. Whew.
Today, I followed everything carefully, step by step using mSD. Worked a treat. Thanks – looking forward to this becoming a default feature – it will be an interesting addition for my classes.

Will there eventually be support for the touchscreen such that no keyboard is required for boot and install when only the touchscreen is present?

Hi,
Out of topic… Can anyone help me to find a distributor of Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. I have been looking for months now, I want to buy 100 or maybe 200 pieces. Most of the seller is only limited to 1 per person.
Hope you can help me. And by the way, this will be ship to Philippines.
Thanks!
George

Are there any plans to add support for HTTP(S) boot (besides TFTP)?

Finally had some “playtime” on the weekend to try the beta bootloader. Very slick! It’s nice to have the Pi Imager running right on the Pi. A couple suggestions for improvement:
1. Downloads of the imager were quite slow. Would it be possible to use local mirrors, the way package updaters do?
2. Being able to flash the bootloader directly from the imager app, without needing to write to an SD card first, would be very nice. An even bigger bonus would be if you could also edit the bootloader environment before you write it to flash. (OK, I’m probably asking for a lot!)
Thanks for all the great work!

When I go use Raspberry Pi Imager and select “Beta Test Bootloader”, I get error “Error downloading OS list from internet” and navigating to https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/net_install/beta/eeprom_recovery_beta.json manually returns 403 error code. This doesn’t appear to be just me because archive.is also gets this error code when it tries to request url. (The normal bootloader json retrieves fine from: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/eeprom_recovery.json )

Worked fine for me!

I am using a Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB). It was very easy to install the beta firmware, but you should write a short text instruction on the blank green screen.

Why do we need an empty FAT32 formatted microSD to install an image from the internet server?

In the first step I started the Raspberry Pi without a microSD. It was nice to see that the Raspberry Pi Imager started automatically from the internet after a while. Good work! In the second step I inserted a microSD that was not empty. In the third step I selected “Erase” from the Imager menu to format the mircoSD to FAT32. And in the fourth step I selected the recommended image “Raspberry Pi OS (32bit)” for installation. The fifth step was to reboot the Raspberry Pi with the new image on the microSD. And nothing more.

Yes, it will take some time if your internet connection is not very fast. But once the new firmware is installed, you really don’t need another computer to format the microSD, load the OS image, or copy the image to the microSD.

Is it possible to use the bootloader to directly download install a custom pi OS instead of taking the detour via the pi imager? I’ve played with the HOST_PATH (etc …) config but ran into some (size of the OS related) issues.
I’m assuming there would be a size limit due to having to be able to run from memory?

If that’s not possible:
Is there a way (parameters/ config) to tell the network installer which image to flash in a headless setup, without user interaction?