How to start over with configuring the SBC from an SD card image of Armbian?

[redjr]

I've been hopelessly trying to get Armbian(Buster) and OMV to work together properly.  But alas no luck.  I decided to start over using a fresh and latest image on the SD card.  I believe I may have unwittingly screwed up the eMMC boot process because I added an M.2 SATA drive in yesterday and have since removed it.  Hence my quest to simply get the SBC up and running from the SD card.

 

I have tried everything this morning, I cannot get an image to load at all.  One of my questions is; do the hard drives need to be installed just to get the SBC working?  I have tried with them in and out to no avail.  Are there some lingering config files residing on the HDs that are necessary for the SBC to boot up properly.  I hope not!  I want to do all of the HD configuring and setup from within OMV once I get that reinstalled.  But, I can't even get the SBC to come alive.  Is there switch on the Helios64 mobo that will reset it to factory defaults?

 

I'm at at a loss at the moment, as I can't even Putty into the board, and nothing comes up on my screen (USB-C).

 

Any help and advice would be appreciated.

 

Rick

[redjr]

What does the Recovery switch (SW2) do?

[clostro]

https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/button/#recovery-button

Usb type-c to emmc flashing according to wiki. I'm not sure how it works though, never tried it.

[Polarisgeek]

I had to run through the whole install process 6 or 7 times when I upgraded my drives.  I also tried 1 drive or 5 drives and nothing seemed to matter.  I think there's an issue burning the image onto the SD card using Balena Etcher.  I tried a different burning program and everything installed and fired up perfect.  

[redjr]

Not sure it's an issue with Balena Etcher.  I've been using that for years and it's always worked as expected.  What I ended up doing was putting back the M.2 SATA card back in the Helios64 so at least I have my Armbian OS working.  All my drives seem to be ok as well.  However, I tried to uninstall OMV5, but since I'm a novice at Linux that didn't go as planned.  I searched the web, and it seems there is no uninstall process for OMV, that will cleanly remove everything, so a user can re-install it.  Now, after trying to re-install OMV5, the web-page administration logon page loads, but I get a series of errors, and it refuses to log me on.  So, I'm dead in the water at the moment.  My son had warned me that OMV just doesn't seem ready for prime time.  He's an IT pro and he spent 1.5 hours last night, remotely trying to troubleshoot OMV5 to no avail.  That's when I decided to start over this morning.  It seems I'm about halfway there now. 

[redjr]

Here's the error I get when trying to log on to the OMV5 web administration page.

 

[redjr]

I got part of this resolved.  I was able to boot from a fresh SD card and rebuild just Armbian.  I have not reinstalled OMV5, and most likely will not.  I'm still looking around for a more suitable NAS/SAN solution that will run on the Helios64.

.

[Heisath]

Why not just install and configure the servies you need seperately? 

 

If you want samba / windows network share, take samba. `apt install samba`

For dns / dhcp / dns over tls there's dnsmasq, stubby...

For sharing with TV, you could use minidlna.

 

For backups DO NOT use raid. Raid is not a backup solution. Rather use rsync or more advanced tools to sync the drives at predefined time intervals. This gives you defined backup behaviour and allows you to use the disk in all other devices without problems should the helios fail.

[redjr]

For now I'll be using Samba.  This was more an exercise of learning and whether or not OMV could be a worthy and reliable solution for my modest backup needs.  I never had any intention of using the disks in any RAID configuration to store meaningful data.