If you regularly need to reset or restore a Raspberry Pi, it can become a bit annoying to have to power down the rPi, unplug the sdcard, and re-flash the original image back again. Not to mention it causes mechanical stress to the device and requires physical access to the rPi.
This repo contains a script which can be used to create a Pi OS/raspian image
which has a /boot/factory_reset utility which can be used to reset the pi
remotely over ssh back to the pristine installation state.
The factory reset causes the rPi to reboot to a recovery partition, upon which it restores the original root partition, and then reboots back to the fresh installation.
These Pi OS/raspbian images can be directly flashed and run:
https://github.com/limepepper/raspberry-pi-factory-reset/releases
You will need an sdcard with at least enough space to flash the images. The released images and script were tested with 32GB cards, but you might be able to get away with 8GB for lite images.
- clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/limepepper/raspberry-pi-factory-reset.git
- Download a source image and save it to the root of the project directory then unzip it
$ wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_armhf/images/raspios_armhf-2021-03-25/2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf.zip
$ unzip 2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf.zip
$ ls
2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf.zip
2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.img
create-factory-reset
- Make the script executable
$ chmod +x create-factory-reset
- Execute the script which modifies the image:
$ sudo ./create-factory-reset -i 2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.img
- This will produce a new image with
restoresuffix like so;
2021-03-04-raspios-buster-armhf.restore.img
you can flash this to the rPi
Once the pi is booted, it will work as a normal Pi OS/raspbian installation,
however it includes a utility which can be run as root with --reset argument,
which will trigger a factory-reset.
For example you could do the following (over ssh) from the rPi:
root@raspberrypi:~# /boot/factory_reset --reset
factory restore script
resetting
rebooting...
Connection to raspberrypi.local closed by remote host.
Connection to raspberrypi.local closed.
The Pi will restore to a fresh installation:
The pi will then reboot back to a fresh installation of Raspbian. The script sets up the restored raspbian so ssh is running and available.
A typical raspbian image contains 2 partitions, one with the boot partition and the other with the root partition containing the OS. Upon first booting, raspbian expands the root partition as to completely fill the available space in the sdcard.
This script modifies the rasbian image file to add the following features:
- Adds a 3rd partition used for recovery containing a pristine copy of Pi OS
- Adds a utility to the root partition to call a factory-reset
fedora
sudo dnf install zip e2fsprogs
debian/ubuntu
sudo apt-get install uuid-runtime zip
(and any other packages providing tools for your distro...) This has only been tested on fedora 33
Raspberry pi seem to have stopped the sequence of releases here and switched to calling it Raspberry Pi OS and providing downloads here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-32-bit
Assuming these images are similarly structured, they would work as well, but they are not tested.
Obviously factory resetting a device is a destructive process, so don't try this unless you understand what you are doing.
The code is provided as is, and can be used/modified for any purpose, attribution is appreciated but not required.
This project was inspired by a blog post on binarycents.com, but that site appears to be gone now: http://www.binarycents.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-remote-reinstall/
Some other sources of information:
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/80070/remote-full-reset-re-install-of-a-raspberry
There is some more information about the process in these blog posts: