Hi Radxa Forum,
I have been using a Rock 5 ITX board for a while and have always used a simple booting setup from a microSD card. Since I bought a 2TB NVMe drive, I would like to copy the system image to it and retire the microSD card.
I have tried running rsetup to find the Overlay referred to in the documentation as “Enable EMMC”, but the closest match is “Enable SDHCI”. I attempted to enable it, but nothing happened. After rebooting, it wasn’t obviously enabled. It appears that I already have EMMC and NVME devices available. I can even copy my image file to them.: sudo xzcat /home/radxa/rock-5-itx_debian_bullseye_kde_b3.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M status=progress
— produces no errors.
And running lsblk gives this:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mtdblock0 31:0 0 16M 0 disk
mmcblk1 179:0 0 231.2G 0 disk
├─mmcblk1p1 179:1 0 16M 0 part /config
├─mmcblk1p2 179:2 0 300M 0 part /boot/efi
└─mmcblk1p3 179:3 0 230.9G 0 part /
mmcblk0 179:32 0 7.3G 0 disk
mmcblk0boot0 179:64 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk0boot1 179:96 0 4M 1 disk
zram0 254:0 0 15.5G 0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1 259:0 0 1.9T 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 16M 0 part /media/radxa/config
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 300M 0 part
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 5.3G 0 part
I’m having trouble getting any information from rsetup about the current system. The only thing I know is that if the SD card is inserted, the system boots from it without any issues. However, if the SD card is not in place, the system doesn’t boot at all. I want to note that I’m not familiar with Linux, but I’ve done my best to explain the issue.
Thanks for your help.
Rock 5 w/o SD card
Thanks.
I followed the instructions there closely.
As I stated, I am unable to tell if rsetup has made any changes to the SPI bootloader.
At the point where those instructions say " Unplug the SD card and boot from NVME" it fails to boot.
https://github.com/radxa-build/rock-5-itx/releases/download/b6/rock-5-itx_debian_bullseye_kde_b6.img.xz
Pls try this image.
That’s the image I have used from the start.
Do you have a debug serial port where you can see the boot log?
No. I assume I can just buy any old USB-to-TTL serial cable on Amazon for it right?
You can remove the ssd card first, short the recovery pin, connect ssd, hdmi, mouse, then power up, he will enter into the robi system, you can go through the robi system to choose to write to spi + nvme.
When you say “then power up”, what do you mean? The Rock 5’s LED is always on so the board always has power even when the OS is shut down. Do you mean I have to totally disconnect the 24-pin ATX power cable?
I tried what you suggested (without disconnecting the ATX power) and it doesn’t boot, it just hangs.
I had to put the micro SD back in and then it just booted back into Debian as normal.
Maybe the roobi system inside your emmc was erased, you can follow the instruction below to reinstall the roobi system to emmc, then go through roobi to install the image to spi+nvme.
Thanks Ken.
I followed the instructions and it all went smoothly except for the final step.
I had an image on my NVMe already and for whatever reason ROOBI didn’t load, I guess it saw a config file present and just skipped ROO I.
it simply booted right off the NVMe into the RadxaOS which was okay.
Thanks for your help.
Sadly the system doesn’t work well with my mvme drive. None of the browsers can run for 5minutes without crashing.
There are two pins near the sd card that say recovery, shorting them force to roobi system.
Regarding the browser issue, could you please tell us what you did. kernel log sent after the crash.
Shorting those pins was the first thing I tried. It didn’t work with any configuration of sd card or nvme or no drive connected. It will not boot off the eMMC at all even though I can see the eMMC drive and even flash a new image to it while booted from the other drives. I have ordered a serial cable.
The browsers are all good again. I think I might have maxed out the swap which was cause the previous issue with them.
I reran the process and it’s normal, I think maybe the spi flash is still not written to the firmware.
I have a serial cable and I can log in to the radxa rock 5 via the com4 line on my old PC.
What do I have to check?
1.rsetup -> update spi bootloader , wait a moment
2.power up with ssd
paste the uboot log here
Note that the maskrom cmakes the SoC boot in priority from eMMC as soon as it finds an image there. I figured that it’s possible to force the board to boot from SD by tying the boot selector pin to the ground via a 20kohm resistor. The pin is accessible on the right of the button (towards the front of the board when it’s installed in a PC enclosure).
The boot sequence is USB —> SD Card —> NVME —> SCSI —> eMMC
That’s a boot sequence implemented by a boot loader. The boot sequence of the SoC is eMMC first, then SD: http://rockchip.wikidot.com/boot-sequence
In the example above, if a bootable image was written to the eMMC, the chip will load the boot loader from it (which was the point). The difficulty then can be to make the boot loader chain to another one found somewhere else. It’s often easier to just configure it to find an extlinux.conf on all devices, provided that this boot loader actually works, of course.