I finally cracked it: a fully headless install of Raspberry Pi OS (based on Debian 13 – Trixie) onto an NVMe SSD on a Raspberry Pi 5. No keyboard. No monitor. No mouse. Just SSH.
https://wolfpaulus.com/rp5-cli/
Thanks for the write up, I appreciate the time and effort invested to make guides like this.
I assume this approach is needed if the user doesn't have a USB to NVMe adapter? Otherwise, they could just write an image directly via the adapter.
One other approach worth considering is to use RPiBoot to boot the Raspberry Pi 5 via files served from a connected computer over USB.
One method is to boot into a minimal Linux distribution that presents any storage on the RPi5 (such as NVMe) as a mass storage device on the host system (via the Linux Kernel's mass-storage-gadget driver). Once presented an image can be written using the RPi Imager application on the host computer.
This method requires no SDcard, but I wouldn't say was straightforward for a beginner to follow.
Statistics: Posted by phattmatt — Mon Dec 15, 2025 12:09 pm