CryBaby

I would put boot and system on the eMMC. Then it will run with or without the SSD, which I would reserve for data. Things like VMs and containers that get a lot of writes can go on the SSD and be symbolically linked to their system folders.

Sounds to me like a bad SD card. If you get a splash screen there must be some sort of bootloader. Another possibility is an inadequate power supply. Try one with more amps.

Will it cook my breakfast too?

linux-sunxi@googlegroups.com is where they used to hang out but I don't know if they are still active there.

https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Build-Preparation/ Once you have the code installed copy the above-linked patch to build/patch/kernel/archive/sunxi-something/ and do the compile.

There is a patch. It doesn't appear to have reached mainline yet. Perhaps it could be added to Armbian builds. You probably want to go back to your original, working, kernel.

I believe the nand is not supported. This is not a great loss as it is flaky and unreliable. Not sure about the rtc. Do you have a battery?

This is likely a $PATH issue. usermod is in /usr/sbin which is probably not in your user's $PATH. If you su without adding - you do not get root's $PATH but with sudo you do.

That does look like a bad SD card. If another one works that would tend to confirm it.

I would guess you have fiddled with /etc/fstab or copied your root partition from elsewhere without fiddling with your /etc/fstab. Or maybe /boot/armbianEnv.txt At any rate, the kernel is looking for a partition with UUID=0b77.... to mount at / but isn't finding it. So you need to either change the UUID it is looking for to the one your root partition has, or change your root partition to have the UUID it is looking for.

You could set up a cron job to reboot it every so often. Log in with PuTTY and type sudo crontab -e This will open the default crontab in an editor, probably nano. At the end of the file add the line 0 * * * * systemctl reboot to reboot every hour on the hour. It needs to have a newline at the end, ie. a blank line at the bottom of the file. man 5 crontab will tell you more.

I haven't tried it lately but it didn't work last time I did. It looks like everything is in place but it does't actually work. My conclusion was it is a bug or at least a lack of support for the hardware.

A better power supply might fix 1 and 2, they can go bad over time. 3 is a bug, sometimes you will get a connection, but mostly no carrier.

CONFIG_GMAC_TX_DELAY seems to have been added to uboot in 2015 so the question is is it being set in armbian? I don't know if it can be set in bootEnv.txt or you have to set it at build time. I don't have access to my cubietruck right now...

That looks like it is working to me. I have been fiddling with my cubietruck recently and I notice that it doesn't always connect to the network too, so maybe the problem has nothing to do with your carrier board.