lavorrick

I've had some success with this which I posted elsewhere: It's not perfect, in particular you need to be mindful of Armbian updates which sometimes break things again. My system is up to kernel 5.8.14 on the hard drive now and that's OK, 5.8.15 seemed to break things so I had to rollback. I've decided to leave it on 5.8.14 for the time being,

I've managed to get this to work finally, for my use case, which is a directly connected Seagate desktop drive - ID 0bc2:3321 Seagate RSS LLC - using the latest Armbian release 20.08.3 with kernel version 5.8.10, booting from petitboot. The steps I took were basically: Install armbian 20.08.1 onto an MMC card. Boot the N2 from the card and "apt update" and "apt upgrade" to bring it up to the latest kernel etc. and perform other basic configuration. Make a partition on the hard drive ready to take the root partition. Run nand-sata-install to copy the root partition onto the hard drive. Edit /boot/boot.ini and add "usb_storage.quirks=0bc2:3321:" to the linux command line parameters. This enables smartctl to work correctly when the system is up and running. Create a directory /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-block Create an executable script in that directory with these contents: delay=20 echo Sleeping for ${delay} seconds to allow disk to be found... sleep ${delay} I tried various values for $delay, for me 20 seems to work consistently, values higher or lower would work sporadically. "update-initramfs -u" to incorporate the new script into the ramdisk. Reboot the N2 from the MMC card and verify that it boots correctly and uses the root FS that's now on the hard disk. "umount /boot" to get the MMC out of the way. /boot should now be empty. "rsync -av /media/mmcboot/boot/ /boot" to copy the /boot directory from the MMC to the hard disk. power the N2 down, remove the MMC card and flick the switch so it boots using SPI. Power it up, system should now boot solely using petitboot and the hard drive. I don't really understand why this has worked, but hope it may help someone else. None of this script business with the delay was necessary when using kernel 4.9.x so there definitely seems to be some problem with the 5.x kernel series, presumably around the UAS driver or whatever, but this is beyond my understanding.

Nothing useful to add here really except a +1 with the same problem, using Seagate desktop drives. Works fine on 4.9 but not on 5.6.