It gets problematic if it is only Windows that is available. In the past I advised people to download Knoppix and boot the PC with that so you have full control. But nowadays SecureBoot might already be a showstopper, unless you know how to deal with it. So your best Linux is probably the ROCK5 with Armbian Bookworm. You can use that to edit the Trixie SD-card. Or upgrade bookworm in-place to Trixie, I have done it more than 10 times in 2025H2, still 1 or 2 computers to go.

I don't know how to set loglevel to 7 in armbianEnv.txt 😕 On Windows after flashing the SD card, I don't have access to the files (ext4 partition probably). And on my Linux VM I'm not able to mount the SD card 😕

From the log I see: Model: Radxa ROCK 5B 272910 bytes read in 34 ms (7.7 MiB/s) I would expect Radxa ROCK 5B+ Or is it 1 DTB nowadays? The bytes read should represent the DTB file that is loaded, I use extlinux so can see what files are loaded, seems this 2025.10 build does not show this. Also be aware it first tries EFI booting, it fails as one can see, so no issue here, but I got confused on my ROCK5B (not the newer upgraded + board) because I had an NVME connectod with a working bootaa64.efi grub.cfg etc as well, so it booted something else than the image from SD-card. I was my own tuned rootfs, so was rather easy to see, but other occasion I did not notice and wasted a lot of time. For this case, what does the kernel spit out ? set loglevel to 7 in armbianEnv.txt

Try what? Do I need to guess what "the most current stable Armbian" is ? Best post an URL + sha256sum what you are doing/using. In theory, I could fairly easy merge it into booting in a KVM, it has then properly working (virtual) RTC from the host (ROCK5B or NanoPi-R6C or RPi4B), but likely needs generic Debian Trixie kernel+initrd/(DTB). That can hide potential errors with your hardware, like a dangling wire in your cable or RJ45 connector or duplicate DHCPserver in LAN or worse (criminals). Or you have ethernet time protocol working, various ethernet HW supports it, like on RPi. Or what do you use to manage your network? Recently netplan.io got pushed, that was a disaster for me, such that I banned Ubuntu now.

Thanks geoW, I look to be having some success with the 25.2.3 build I just have to see if it survives the ugrades