The Raspberry Pi is typically booted from an SD card which contains the bootloader and the root partition. This can be limiting from a space and speed perspective,and writes to the card will slowly cause it’s death. SD media doesn’t typically use the same wear leveling technology that goes into a solid state drive. Today I’ll take a quick look at how you can boot your Pi from an NFS server.

The Pi can have it’s root partition on an NFS share, however you must still use the SD card to hold the firmware and bootloader. Think of this as the equivalent of having your BIOS stored on the SD, and the network share for all other storage. The catch here is that you’ll need a 2GB+ card to be able to get the unit booting normally before moving the OS over to the network share.

Before beginning if you haven’t installed Raspbian check out my article on it. Also, I recommend you install rpi-update on the Pi and get your firmware up to date ( sudo rpi-update) as mentioned in the previous article. Note that if you are on a 2GB SD card you may want to hold off on any updates until after the move to larger storage.
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