Raspberry Pi PXE Boot – Network booting a Pi 4 without an SD card

Install Raspbian on an SD card and install needed tools

Let’s start configuring your client system for netboot. This is the Raspberry Pi that will eventually boot without a micro SD card installed.

  • Download PiOS Lite. For this tutorial I used the Bullseye release.
  • Copy the Bullseye image onto an SD card. I suggest using the PiOS Imager. Warning! This will overwrite data on the device specified. Triple check you are writing to the SD card and not your laptop drive!
  • Put the SD card in your client Raspberry Pi 4 and boot it. Using the lite version of raspbian give you a text console only. If you want a graphical console you can use the full version and it should work. I have not tested this workflow with the full version.
  • Log in via the console using the login you created with the Imager.
  • Connect your Raspberry Pi to the internet via an ethernet cable.
  • Update PiOS via apt-get and install the rpi-config program:

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