Hey there. Thanks for the detailed tutorial.
I tried following it to install Armbian Trixie minimal on my Raspberry Pi 5's nVME (I'm on a headless setup with SSH access). The SD card that boots and runs the system so far is also an Armbian Trixie minimal installation. Apparently nobody has confirmed the instructions to work for that device / setup in this thread yet. So far I also have failed. After following through all steps my device wouldn't connect via ethernet (the LEDs didn't even blink). For simplifying things and rule out a source for possible mistakes, I then repeated the whole process without encrypting the drive, again without much success.
Here's what I suspect to be the problem: The Armbian minimal image for the Raspberry family comes already with two partitions:
a boot partition with a number of .dtb files for each device of the Raspberry family
a "root" partition with all other files
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/loop0p1 8192 532479 524288 256M b W95 FAT32
/dev/loop0p2 532480 3088383 2555904 1.2G 83 Linux
I suspect it to boot in a different way than the image in the example, which seems to directily have all the files which I find in my second partition of the image. So, what I tried was to just create two partitions, mimicing the ones on the Image:
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 8192 532479 524288 256M b W95 FAT32
/dev/nvme0n1p2 532480 3907029167 3906496688 1.8T 83 Linux
I would then just copy the contents of each partition respectively. But even that wouldn't boot the way it did with the SD card. Of course I could just use dd to copy the image to the 2TB nVME but that would take forever (20 h aprox.) and it wouldn't result in an encrypted system.
My questions are:
Is it even possible to use the way of copying boot files and contents in this tutorial to achieve a bootable nVME?
If the image for the Raspi family relies on its own boot partition will I ever be able to use it for decrypting an encrypted drive before booting from it at all? Can I use it for both, booting the device and decrypting the drive, or would that be principally impossible?
I'll be happy for any help for making it work or hint if the described procedure cannot work for my setup.
Tonight I'll also join an install party and might have the opportunity to plug a screen to my Raspi and see if it gives hints during the boot sequence.
EDIT: I think I understand now that this script is probably only for SD cards …
