Hi Mattia,
that worked, it's booting from usb ssd now.
Thanks a lot
Stefan

Hi Mattia, Thanks for your instructions, however I'm struggling a bit with the Linux I'm afraid! As you correctly suggested the large .ext4 partition is not visible in Windows. I ran up AstroArch from the microSD on my RPi, used VNC from my PC to see the AstroArch desktop, plugged the USB drive into the RPi noted that there were the two removable media additions, used the tools in AstroArch to edit the cmdline.txt file in the USB drive boot folder, but when I came to the /etc/fstab I did not have write permission. I know it's something I should know how to manage but perhaps you (or @Stefan) could suggest what I need to do next?
Ed

Hey Ed, the fastest way is to fire up a terminal and type sudo nano /etc/fstab

After you are done exit with ctrl x and confirm saving the file. You should be good after this step

Hi Ed, if you start from SD and have ssd conncted and mounted, you'll have to edit fstab and cmdline.txt under the correct mountpoints. You can read them by open Dolphin, then select a 'removable device' and call 'properties' from the context menu. If 'mounted from' is '/dev/sda1 (or sda2)' then you copy the path beside 'mounted on' and use that path to open the file. (see the picture)
Be careful not to edit fstab or cmdline.txt on the SD card, edit those ones stored on the ssd.




Regards
Stefan

Making progress but now seem to be trying to use the wrong password for the astronaut login……I thought it was astronomy….am I wrong?

for sudo it is astro
astronomy is th wifi pwd

Thanks both @mattia and @stefan - AstroArch booting and running from USB…..

Sorry to be a numpty pain in the b…..
I tried astroarch-update but could not complete the update because the ‘Partition / too full’…..
It seems that the boot folder (limited to 256MB was the target for the new data download rather than the home folder in the .ext4 folder which has the remains of the 64GB available so is plenty big enough….

of course, I haven't documented the procedure yet so I forgot a quite important step.

You must edit the file /etc/systemd/system/resize_once.service

Change the line 7 from /dev/mmcblk0 to /dev/sda

On the line ExecStop there is a \p, drop the p and save the file

After that run the following 2 commands

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start resize_once

And the partition should grow now to fill the whole usb space

Thanks, that worked for me without any issues. The full size of the ssd is now available.

Hi Mattia, I note that you have added AstroDMx as a planetary capture software, and I look forward to trying it out soon. As part of my wish list for a future version of AstroArch you might also consider adding FireCapture which many of us are already very familiar with. In the absence of a 64-bit version for ARM devices, which is being slowly worked on, there is a workaround described here: groups.io/g/firecapture/topic/94528834#2885
Thanks, Ed

hey Ed, unfortunately dpkg is not part of ArchLinux and I believe (although I am not 100% sure) you can't have the same repo (it would be [core]) in multiple fashions (aarch64 and armv7).
Additionally, in my experience, having the same library in multiple fashion (aarch64, armv7) is asking often for troubles on the OS.
FireCapture and AstroDMx very unfortunately are not open source but the latter ships all the time the new version for all supported systems (arm32, arm64, x86-64, MacOS and Win) while the former is focused mainly around Windows (the latest release has been available for Windows since a couple of months already and not for the other platforms).
The autor if FireCapture himself explicitely said that he's not interested anymore in the aarch64 architecture.

Given all the stuff ^, I personally believe and suggest to stick with AstroDMx for the time being until (or if eventually) FireCapture will be available natively for aarch64

Mattia