Boot from USB SSD - Help!

#1

I have a Rock 4A v1.52 and I’ve been trying to set up booting from a USB port. I got this nice SATA adapter with UASP and the performance should be quite good.

After some issues I managed to successfully put uboot on the SPI flash: NVIDIA_Share_gaV8tHqtOw
However, the armbian that I have on that SSD does not get booted. The blue light stays on with no interruption and nothing ever happens from there.

I also can’t see what’s happening at boot time because the HDMI port does not yet output anything at that point. There are no other storage devices connected, no SDcard, no eMMC. I even plugged a keyboard in and tried to hit enter or space a couple times to no effect.

For some sanity checking, I put an SD card in, shorted pins 23 and 25 during boot and that worked and the machine works just fine. The HDMI also starts working once the kernel begins to load.

Any ideas/suggestions to get that USB boot working?

Thanks!

#2

I was able to get USB booting to work by wiping the u-boot that I previously put on the SPI, and following
the instructions here, specifically under ‘Method Three: Use the Armbian nand-sata-install script’.

Before wiping u-boot the nand-sata-install script did not give me the SPI bootloader option.