For the life of me I cannot ssh if I use the blenaEtcher to flash the drive. I know I have to drop an empty ssh file in both SD and SSD, but no matter what I do it won't connect. My WiFi router has the raspberry pi's IP as inactive. I've tried ssh directly to that IP with no luck.
The only way I can ssh is if I use the Raspberry Pi Imager. So I guess I will try re-flashing the drives again.
I know I can ssh that way because I can set up ssh during the flash, but for some reason I can't get the Pi to boot up from the SSD instead of the SD card.
The problem is, as I said, a lot has changed. Balena etcher (or any similar tool including dd) writes the raw image to your storage device but it doesn't do the post installation configuration that Imager does. As there is no longer a default user you'll find that your Pi is sitting at a prompt on its console asking you to create one. ssh won't be enabled at that point even if you added a ssh file to the boot partition.
Further, dropping a wpa_supplicant file into the boot partition also no longer works. That was dropped almost two years ago with the move to Network Manager in Bookworm.
Use Raspberry Pi Imager and apply customisation settings. As you discovered.
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Sun Aug 17, 2025 2:05 pm