Sorry if I have come to the wrong place. A friend has given me an Orange Pi 5 Plus, fitted with a 1GB SSD, and I have been trying to get it started up. According to its previous owner, the SSD had been completely erased (I don't know why). It had no SD card with it when I got it.
I downloaded the online instruction manuals, and set about trying to start it up, using a suitable 32GB SD card. I first tried with (OrangePi) Ubuntu, but ran into problems using Balena Etcher. It apparently transfers the Ubuntu Image to the SD card, but just as it appears to complete the process of verification, it produces a helpful error message ('There was an Error'....). I also tried with other OSes, with the same result, so it seems to be either me or the OPi which is having problems.
After a bit of research, I found a description of using the Linux command 'dd' to transfer an image, so I did this, under a machine with Linux Mint - this appeared to go OK.
I then plugged in the SD card, and powered up the OPi. After a delay, I get what looks like a Ubuntu 'splash' page on screen, and it appears to go through an installation process (? not sure if thats whats happening). However, after several minutes, there is a message saying there is an error, and a desktop session will be started to allow debugging - but I can't get anything else to happen.
I have asked the previous owner, but he says probably the bootloader is missing. (I suspect he never got it running). Here I come unstuck - I can't find any info on bootloaders - like what it is, where to get it, what to do with it, etc, so I am hoping someone here can point me in the right direction. I have gone through the instruction manual, but it seems to be slightly out of date, and I had no success using its instructions. Ideally, I would like to boot the OPi from the SSD, if that is possible, but have no idea how to go about this - and there seems to be a great deal of conflicting (wrong?) info online.
I did try the Orange Pi 'official' forums, but got lost in the chinese messages which came up.
