Boot from drive connected to USB?

[tadvi]

Is there a way to boot without SD card? Directly boot via hard drive or flash disk connected to the USB?

[HermannSW]

Friendlyarm people need to answer the direct question (for Raspberry Pis the answer is that only the new Pi3 is able to boot from USB drive, no other Pi).

I once used "plop" boot manager for USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI) on an old laptop with dead harddisk (plop was booted from CD):
https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

It is free software and can be compiled, so maybe it can be used with H3 based Neo/M1. If that is possible, then plop would be booted (very quickly since small) from an SD card and continue booting from USB drive you have configured.

[tadvi]

I would like to avoid having to use SD card all together. I have few external hard drives laying around.
Booting from hard drive would make sense for small personal media server.

[HermannSW]

> I would like to avoid having to use SD card all together.
>
Seems not possible.

All Nanopi H3 OSes use U-boot for booting:
http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_M1#Compile_U-boot

And U-boot does always boot from an SD card (or NAND), not USB:
http://linux-sunxi.org/H3_Manual_build_howto