Raspberry Pi Run from USB

What  a day…   I decided this morning that I would run my Raspberry Pi (well one of them anyway) from USB for the following reasons: I have lots of tiny microSD cards and lots of USB sticks or USB adaptors for full size SD cards.

And that’s all fine and good – but the instructions out there can be confusing.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=44177

Followed this no problem – putting a copy of everything onto a USB stick (aside from references to SDA2 which in my case turned out to be SD1).

All that remained was to make the boot disk (microSD). I had some 512Meg and smaller cards so I formatted one as FAT32 using SD formatter on the PC.  Some kind fellow provided a copy of his boot files which I promptly put onto the SD card – plugged it in and…

Nothing – it took me a little while to twig that this would be for the ORIGINAL RASPBERRRY PI, not the Pi2. SO I mounted my backup microSD, rebooted the Pi, copied the files from BOOT to the new SD, put THAT in the Pi and tried again.

Success… but for a complaint from the PI that required a CONTROL_D to continue. Did that – and I was in action – it turns out that you have to tell etc/fstab about the new USB drive as well.

So now I have a fully working system on SD but for a minor niggle. When the Pi boots up it complains that:

Mount point /boot does not exist… and sure enough when you look at the file system in WINSCP – there is no boot directory – I’m guessing because I’m looking at the USB stick…..

Don’t get me wrong – everything works – but it would be really nice to clear up that bootup error message – anyone know what to do?