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I am trying to install the mini root filesystem distribution of Alpine Linux on my Raspberry Pi Zero W which can be downloaded for the armhf architecture from the official Alpine Linux download page. I use this version and not the regular one for Raspberry Pis because I want to modify the image in a chroot environment prior to flashing it to the SD card. The approach is explained in two blog articles (manually and scripted) but unrelated to the actual problem. It is enough to know that the regular Raspberry Pi image will only expand into a regular file system in memory during first boot and hence cannot be modified in advance.

The issue I am facing is that the mini root filesystem distribution makes use of symbolic links. These, however, are not supported on the FAT32 file system. FAT32 seems to be the only file system recognized by the Raspberry Pi as boot partition. If I create for instance an ext4 formatted partition which supports symbolic links, the Raspberry Pi won't boot at all.

Other Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi often use multiple partitions: A boot partition formatted as FAT32 and a second one, e.g. formatted as ext4, which contains the actual root file system.

How would I create such a boot partition? Where would I get the files from that need to be on it in order to boot the Raspberry Pi, then load the root file system from the second partion?

Dirk
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  • It's not totally clear what you're after, but to create a custom image, mimic the structure of the normal one. One way to do that (and ensure you have all the correct stuff in the boot partition) is to start with a Raspbian image and replace the second partition: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/27545/5538 – goldilocks Jun 25 '20 at 14:17
  • Could you clarify why you can't create an extra EXT4 partition? Are you running our of space? – Dmitry Grigoryev Jun 30 '20 at 12:58
  • No problem to create an extra partition for the root file system. However, then I still don't know what to put on the `FAT32` boot partition. Apparently this is not the right use case for this Alpine flavour, I think it is more meant to be used in Docker containers and such that "borrow" the Kernel from the host operating system. – Dirk Jul 02 '20 at 15:40

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