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NVMe boot won't work unless you have the external PCI Express port enabled, and there's a working NVMe drive with a valid boot partition! If you don't have that (e.g. you used Raspberry Pi Imager with an external USB NVMe adapter to flash Pi OS to an NVMe drive from another computer), then follow the steps in the next section to clone your existing Pi OS install to an NVMe SSD.
'''Use <span class="tb_red">SD Card Copier</span> tool Here are a few ways to flash the OS onto the to an NVME SSD On Raspberry Pi OS:'''
[[File:Sd-copoer-scrot.png]]
'''12. Flash the SSD with Raspberry Pi Imager'''
To get the NVMe SSD to boot your Pi, it needs to have an OS. One option would be to clone an existing installation to it using ''rpi-clone'' or some other tool (see below), but my preferred option is to flash a fresh Pi OS install using [https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ Raspberry Pi Imager].
Once flashing is complete, pull the NVMe drive, attach it to your Pi 5, and it should boot off it (with or without a microSD card inserted)—assuming you have the bootloader up to date and set the '''BOOT_ORDER''' appropriately!
'''23. Clone your microSD boot volume to an NVMe SSD'''
Assuming you already have Raspberry Pi OS on a microSD card that is booting your Raspberry Pi 5 internally, and the NVMe SSD is connected and visible (check if you see a device /dev/nvme0n1 after running lsblk), you can use rpi-clone to clone the internal microSD boot volumes to your NVMe SSD: