Debian minimal/cli on nvme

#1

Hello I’m new here and have a question about installing Debian minimal on the nvme.
I tried the “armbian Bookworm minimal CLI”. I installed it on a SD-Card with balenaEtcher.
Startup from SD-Card works perfect.

After that I tried to install it on the nvme as in this tutorial:
https://fieldday.io/armbian-rock5b/

But after I removed the SD-Card the Rock 5B doesn’t boot anymore and the LED shines in blue.

Is there any way to get Debian minimal run from nvme?
Or to find the Error I have in my installation?

#2

Hi @stonie2oo4 - welcome to the group!
Did you have two ext4 patitions on your NVMe SSD prior to following that tutorial ? Having an ext4 partition was mandatory/pre-req (when I wrote that tutorial).

#3

Thank you for your advise.
Thats a very good question :sweat_smile:.
I have partitiond the nvme, but I don’t know anymore which filesytem.

But what I know, when I executed armbian-install, it asked me if I want ext4 or btrfs.

I choosed btrfs. Is that wrong and I must choose ext4?

#4

No harm is trying ext4 again. I have seen people posting error messages with regards to btrfs, but to a different context. May be they all are related. I don’t know to be honest.

#5

Ok :slight_smile:. I tried it now with ext4, but have the same result. After I remove the SD-Card the system doesn’t boot anymore and the blue light shines.

#6

I hate to send on a wild goose chase, especially on things that I myself don’t fully understand. But this is what I would do.

  1. look at the documentation and see what a blue light indication mean
  2. The problem could be either with coping the bootloader onto SP1
  3. or copying the root filesystem onto NVMe SSD.

With regards to checking (3) I would boot the board with SD Card, make sure “lsblk” does list the nvme disk, manually mount it if needed and then check if the root filesystem does exist. If so, then the problem could be with (2)

That would be my approach.

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#7

Just install bootloader on mtd flash, and dd the image to nvme. That’s the way I do to install armbian on nvme.

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#8

It works this way.
Thank you very much :slight_smile:

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