A very useful facility on initial set-up is the ability to define a WiFi SSID/Password in the FAT boot partition.
At school we have a couple of Pis which have already been set up and used with a WiFi router that has now been decommissioned. Is it possible to reactivate that facility in order for them to boot up and connect to a different WiFi router? Connecting them to the school wired network wouldn't be permitted and finding a screen, keyboard and mouse would be a hassle.
Knowing what Operating System has been installed on the RPi boards may be necessary to providing accurate advice. Because 2 years ago the migration from RasPiOS Bullseye to RasPiOS Bookworm introduced major changes to the way network connections are administered.
As an alternative way forward, maybe take a spare RPi board (with on-board wireless) and configure it as a WiFi Access Point with the same SSID and authentication as the one that has been decommissioned. Then you should be able to access the 'orphaned' RPi systems and will be able to update them with whatever network admin tools are in use on those systems.
Statistics: Posted by B.Goode — Wed Aug 27, 2025 10:07 am