Orange Pi Plus 2E boot from mmc, data from SD

[Zammy]

Hi,

 

I am building small file server.

Is it possible to boot from mmc AND have data on sd card without the need of removing sd card on every reboot? I've installed armbian on smaller sd card, used nand-mmc-* script to write armbian onto mmc.

 

Now, everytime I reboot I need to remove sd card, wait for system to load and put sd card back. 

I edited .fex file, setting sd card mode to 1, but it didn't helped.

 

Any ideas/manuals on that?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

 

[Zammy]

Hi again,

 

to be more specific, I followed docs on armbian.com for eMMC install,

did apt-get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade dance, ran nand-sata-install script. 

 

Script suggested only one option (docs says it should be 3 options).

In my case it was only "move system to eMMC", which I did.

 

I formatted sd card with fdisk, changed sd card mode in .fex file and still can

not boot with sd card in slot.

[martinayotte]

To be able to boot from eMMC while the SDCard is still inserted, you will need to have a custom U-Boot that doesn't look at SDCard/mmc0 device at all.

Standard U-Boot always consider the SDCard as the primary boot devices while eMMC is only a fallback when no SDCard present.

 

Another possible workaround is that you still have the /boot partition on the SDCard, but having it configured to use eMMC as the RootFS, so that SDCard space will be almost recovered for data.

To do that, simply boot from eMMC without any SDCard, then insert a copy of your previous SDCard, format the partition, and re-copy the /boot from eMMC to SDCard.

[Zammy]

Thank you for answer, will try 2nd approach, since I have no idea how to build custom U-Boot and it appears to be time-consuming.

[tkaiser]

I formatted sd card with fdisk

 

That deals with partitions, you want to erase the SPL header. SD card without SPL header --> bootloader ignores it: https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/issues/341#issuecomment-230375464

 

(SPL header lives at a storage location prior to partition stuff)

[Zammy]

Hi again,

 

I've connected card via USB adapter and it appeared in the system as /dev/sda.

Before I was not able to see card after I inserted in into SD card slot.

 

Then I did

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1

Created ext4 partition with fdisk (did not made it bootable), wrote partition to the card.

Checked that partition were created. Put SD card into SD card slot and rebooted.

System were not loaded. If I remove the card everything works fine.

 

As far as I see with http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1875-orangepiplus2e-question-with-microsdcard-and-start-computer/ one should write tutorial on this.

I would volunteer if I succeed