Booting Raspberry Pi Off USB

I like Rasperry Pi’s, but they have one glaring problem:

There is no way to shut them down.

I run all of mine as servers, so if I can’t access them over the network you can’t press a button on them and have them shut down, you have to pull out the power cable. Which in my experience ruins the SD card.

However there is a way to boot off a USB storage device instead. I am linking to the official documentation here WHICH YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY READ:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md

But here are the commands for how to do it for a Raspberry Pi 3B running Raspbian:

1. Log into Raspberry Pi.
2. Run this command: echo program_usb_boot_mode=1 | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt
3. Then reboot with “sudo reboot”.
4. When it comes back online run this: vcgencmd otp_dump | grep 17:
5. If it says “17:3020000a” you are good to go.