Booting from NVME

ROCK 5 Series 5A
1

I have just installed Debian 12 Bookworm on an SD card on my Rock 5A.

This is how lsblk looks like :

adb@rock-5a:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
mmcblk1 179:0 0 29.5G 0 disk
├─mmcblk1p1 179:1 0 16M 0 part /config
├─mmcblk1p2 179:2 0 300M 0 part /boot/efi
└─mmcblk1p3 179:3 0 29.2G 0 part /
zram0 253:0 0 3.8G 0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1 259:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 16M 0 part
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 64G 0 part
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 64G 0 part
├─nvme0n1p4 259:4 0 34.9G 0 part
├─nvme0n1p5 259:5 0 33.1G 0 part
└─nvme0n1p6 259:6 0 29.2G 0 part
adb@rock-5a:~$

What I would like to now is to transfer the OS to the partition nvme0n1p2 of the NVME SSD.
Simply copying with DD from SD to that partition, then removing the SD, cycling power, does actually boot, but I receive error messages about config and boot-efi not being found.

Suggestions on how to proceed ?

Thanks

Al

2

If you have an SPI-flash module attached on the bottom side and it is flashed with a U-Boot/bootloader that can boot from NVME SSD, you just need to have a valid EFI or partition on the NVME SSD as well. You need to check fstab and UUID’s, but in principle you can keep them the same as on SD-card. BUT: make sure you only use DD on unmounted partitions.

If mounted, it will be a total mess and corruption, then start from scratch.

3

Thanks indeed. Now everything works as I had desired.

I asked Claude and it told me that the boot process of the SBC cards, like the Rock 5, does not make use of the /boot/efi/ partition, so I can allocate it wherever I want, even with very small size, without the constraint to have it formatted vfat.

I checked and indeed that partition was empty.
All is well what ends well…

Al