Hi all,
I had some difficulty getting my Rock 5T up and running and thought it might be useful to share my experience on the forum. I am no expert, but I am very familiar with Linux, I’ve had a few Orange Pi devices in the past and recently set up a system on the Rock 3C, so I expected things to go smoothly with the Rock 5T.
I am planning to build a NAS based on the Rock 5T. My version has 12GB RAM. Between this and the pretty impressive CPU, I expect to be able to host newer software like Immich and Paperless NGX without issues.
I started with an Armbian Bookworm image for the 5T that I found on one of their FTP archives. I choose Bookworm because I know that OpenMediaVault is not up to date with newer Debian releases. I chose Armbian because it’s extremely easy to work with and they provide minimal versions without the bloat of a desktop environment. I flashed the image to file, inserted the SD card in the Rock 5T, powered it up, and… nothing. The green light came on, but nothing happened after that.
Thinking that there might be an issue with the image, I downloaded the latest Radxa OS image and tried to write this to the SD card. The write failed. I downloaded an older Radxa OS image and this also failed. I started thinking that there was a problem with the SD Card, so I tried writing to another card. This also failed. I tried another 2 or 3 older Radxa images and had the same problem.
Thinking that the Radxa images were all somehow corrupted, I went back to Armbian and tried to find some community build versions and found that I had the same original problem; the image writes without error but the Rock 5T didn’t want to boot.
After trying a variety of Armbian images, I gave up and started looking for ideas on the internet. My search suggested that the power supply might be the issue. Apparently, the 5T gets stuck in a boot loop with some power supplies, so I decided to check this.
I connected the device up to my USB serial adapter, launched PuTTY and… nothing happened. I then realized that my serial adapter might not support the surprisingly high Baud rate of 1.5 MHz of these Radxa boards, so I ordered a new serial adapter. When the new adapter finally arrived, I could see that, yes, clearly, the thing kept rebooting in a loop.
Okay, I thought, it’s the power supply, so I tried a few other power supplies. I tried multiple USB chargers and several 12V supplies I had lying around. Nothing made any difference.
After about two weeks of this wasting my time, I eventually had a breakthrough. I tried writing and booting from the android image on the Radxa website. It worked. The green light turned blue and started flashing, confirming that my Rock 5T wasn’t broken, the SD card wasn’t faulty and the power supply worked just fine. The issue seemed to be simply that most of the images for the Rock 5T are somehow broken.
To cut an extremely long story short, I did eventually get everything working as a wanted. I found that Rufus was able to successfully write the Radxa OS images to SD Card and I could boot into Radxa OS. When the same images were written to my NVMe SSD using dd, the resulting drive was corrupted. I found that I could write the original Armbian image I wanted, however, and this booted just fine from the NVMe.
So, if anyone out there is having, or has had difficulties with the Rock 5T, I can confirm that the available images seem to have unexplainable issues. Try writing using Rufus and try a non-debian image like Android or Ubuntu. Chances are that one of them will work.