Upgrade NOOBS to PINN

NOOBS is being deprecated in favour of the RPi Imaging utility (which is a great tool and I even recommend using it to install PINN) but it only installs a single OS, so it does not provide multi-OS boot capability. If you want to use multi-boot and move to a more full featured and supported boot selector and administration utility, then you may want to consider replacing NOOBS with PINN. The instructions below explain how to do this.

• Please make a complete image backup of your whole SD card. Use win32disk imager, Balena Etcher, SD card copier, dd, whatever you like, but make a backup in case you do anything wrong, or in case I forget a step. I will not be responsible if you trash all the OSes that you want to preserve! In fact, I suggest you make a copy of your SD card and then try to upgrade your copy from NOOBS to PINN. If anything goes wrong, just make another copy of your original, thus keeping your original NOOBS SD card safe.
• Download the latest copy of pinn-lite.zip
• unzip pinn-lite.zip over the top of your NOOBS installation (i.e. in the first FAT partition of your SD card). If you are doing this on Windows, it will probably be the only partition Windows will report. This is the partition that includes a recovery.rfs file.
• VERY IMPORTANT! - Edit recovery.cmdline and delete the "runinstaller" option from the text line in that file, and save the file back to the SD card. If you do not do this, PINN will delete all your OSes as it re-partitions your SD card for initial PINN use! You did create that initial backup didn't you? 😉
• BOOT your upgraded SD card which should now use PINN instead of NOOBS.
• You should now be able to benefit from most of the new features available in PINN. Since your OSes were originally installed from NOOBS, it is possible that some PINN features may not work with them, or they will not appear in the correct tabbed categories, but these should be minor issues. If you have any issues, please let me know by raising an issue on Github.