odroid-hc4 is stuck in initramfs after upgrading to armbian bullseye 22.11

[charly_53]

Hi,

i have armbian bullseye (headless) installed on my odroid-hc4.  petitboot is disabled. The boot-partition lies on a sd-card while the root-partion is on a ssd.

this configuration worked fine. After upgrading to armbian bullseye 22.11 the boot process stucks in initramfs cause the root file-system is not found anymore (ALERT! UUID=xxx does not exist. Dropping to a shell. The sd-card with the boot partition as well as the ssd with the root-partition can be mounted on another PC and seem to be flawless. the UUID shown in fstab and initramfs are identical. In initramfs ls /dev/sd* shows no devices while ls /dev/mm* shows the sdcard (mmcblk01...). I don't really know how the boot process works on an arm-system. What steps can I do to narrow down the problem. Thanks in advance.

 

 

Hardware: odroid-hc4, samsung 870 EVO 1TB (sda), WD60EFZX (sdb), BS: armbian-bullseye with OMV 6.0.46-5 fs: ext4 no raid

[Guest]

No expert here but does the system recognise the ssd? Not sure how you would tell if the system can't boot as /boot is on the ssd. Just wondering if this sounds suspiciously like my problem of disappearing ssds after updating my system.

 

My problem is with 2 x Samsung 250gb SSDs not being brought up. If I plug in a Crucial MX500 1Tb ssd it's recognised without a problem. As mentioned in another post of mine, while the system was running. I yanked out(!) one of the Samsung drives and reinserted it and it was then recognised. I have everything running off an sd card (so /boot is not on the ssd) and just use the SSDs for data in a mirrored array. Yanking out the drive is risky, not recommended, even silly, but I did it. It's not a cure but I have ordered two crucial 250Gb ssds and intend to see if they are recognised on boot and if so replace the samsungs one at a time letting the array rebuild itself in between. This problem has also highlighted the advice that you should construct arrays from different manufacturers, so if the samsung problem is cured later I will mix the drives.

 

I also have a 'spare' HC4 and once I have liberated a Samsung above, will install an older kernel and see if they are recognised. I did try rolling back the kernel on the system above using the armbian-config utility buy I'm not sure if I went back far enough and was worried I had already used up my luck in not wrecking my working system so I gave up.

 

If anyone more expert at this has any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this problem we would appreciate the help.

 

And just to be clear again: I *do not* recommend yanking out drives 🙂 I did it as it simulated a disk going down in the mirror so was prepared to take the risk.

[Igor]

On 12/3/2022 at 11:39 PM, charly_53 said:

What steps can I do to narrow down the problem. Thanks in advance.

 

SD  / eMMC card compatibility. Possible workaround = power cycle several times.

 

I found the same problem on Bananapi M5 and it seems this https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/4523 and https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/4524/files helps. If you can, try this. I'll double check when possible.

[charly_53]

It really seems to be, that Samsung ssd (EVO 870) is not recognized with kernel 5.19. After I installed armbian 22.08.1 with kernel 5.10.139 as a test, the ssd is recognized again. But that doesn't help me much as I don't know how to downgrade armbian back to this version

[SHA_ndy]

Hi charly_53,

 

perhaps you can switch to the previous kernel using the "armbian-config" utility (then navigate to System -> Other). Afterwards you could freeze kernel upgrades until the problem is solved kernel-side.

 

 

[charly_53]

Thanks for the hint. Unfortunately that doesn't work. After installing Openmediavault, the first update of Openmediavault will install the latest armbian, even though armbian is set to freeze😠

[Igor]

4 hours ago, charly_53 said:

the first update of Openmediavault will install the latest armbian, even though armbian is set to freeze😠

That should not happen. What
 

apt-mark showhold 

 

tells after installing OMV. It should list that kernel and dtb package are set to hold back from updates.

 

Another workaround is to comment out repository /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list

[charly_53]

Thank you apt-mark hold did the job. I had to mark hold some more armbian-packages. Now it works with armbian 2.08.1 and kernel 5.10.139.

 

I think the problem isn't just with the kernel, but also with the current armbian version

Edited December 9, 2022 by charly_53