Orange Pi5 sometimes boots successfully (NVMe)

[etho201]

I have an Orange Pi 5 (16GB RAM) running Armbian Jammy with the latest updates installed. I am booting from NVMe and when it boots successfully it runs flawlessly without issue. The problem occurs when I reboot -- the majority of the time it does not boot up successfully. Sometimes when it boots I only see the red light (and no green light), and other times I will see the green light flash like normal, yet the external hard drive does not spin up or mount properly. This results in me needing to power down the Orange Pi 5 and try again. Eventually it will boot up successfully (along with the external HDD) and then everything is good; that is, until the next time I have to reboot.

 

A few details that might be helpful to know:

• I ordered the Orange Pi5 from Amazon and I'm using 5V4A Type C Power Supply that came with my device
• My os-release reports as: Armbian 23.02.0-trunk.0112 Jammy
• I'm booting from NVMe. (Samsung SSD 256GB PM991 M.2 2242 42mm PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe MZALQ256HAJD MZ-ALQ2560 Solid State Drive)
• I have an external hard drive configured to automount to "/mnt/hdd" in fstab. I do not believe fstab is mis-configured because I've been using this same HDD with the same fstab entry for my old Raspberry Pi 4 and never had this issue.
• The Hard drive is a WD Elements 25A3 which has its own AC adapter

 

Any ideas of what could be the culprit? I've looked in dmesg (from the successful boot) and dmesg.0 (from the previous unsuccessful boot) and did not see any glaring issues between the two.

[Vybearz]

From my own prespective, i think the problem is the external HDD. Try to boot and reboot several times without the external HDD andsee what happens

[martivo]

My first suspect would also be the external USB drive. Also if you still have an SD card in it, try removing it too and see if it changes anything.

If possible you could also try to change the power supply to see if it has any effect.
Just to rule out these.

[etho201]

Thank you for the suggestions. I disconnected the external USB hard drive and rebooted several times and had the same problem. Occasionally the light on the board would only be red (no green); however, the majority of the time when power cycling the device I get the flashing green light. Even when the green light flashes, it would not boot up completely the majority of the time.

 

So that rules out the external HDD being the problem. I also changed out the power supply with a Raspberry Pi 4 (5V/3A) power supply and it still did the same exact thing -- sometimes it boots fine, and sometimes it does not (yes I know, the RPi4 power supply is below the recommended 5V/4A). This leads me to believe my original power supply is fine (it is 5V/4A after all).

 

Still hunting for the culprit, but sounds like someone had a similar problem here (at least in that it takes several reboots to get it to come up):

This makes me wonder if the issue could be Armbian specific? I have not yet tinkered with the /boot/boot.cmd file though.

Edited February 3, 2023 by etho201

[martivo]

I am on a way newer version, I see you are on trunk.0112, maybe try the latest trunk.0232? 
I also have the 16Gb RAM model and NVME(KingSpec M.2 2242 NVMe PCIe Gen3 x2 SSD,  512GB) without any issues at all. Could you test another model of a nvme  drive to see if it could be related to the nvme drive being used? 
Do you see any pattern with how you reboot the device? Do you use halt/poweroff and then press a button, or do you use reboot command or do you unplug the power? Does it behave the same way regardless of how you do the reboot/restart?

[martivo]

Please show also your /dev/mtdblock0 device partitions "fdisk -l /dev/mtdblock0"
 

[etho201]

Hi Martivo,

 

It may be worth reformatting my SSD and trying from a newer trunk. Regarding the method of reboot, I have tried all methods suggested (sudo reboot now, pressing the button on the device, and unplugging) and it behaves the same way regardless -- only boots up successfully occasionally. Again, once it finally does get up and running, I have no issues.

 

Also, here's the output you requested:

 

❯ fdisk -l /dev/mtdblock0
Disk /dev/mtdblock0: 16 MiB, 16777216 bytes, 32768 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 8BC16F25-9BE8-4E53-9C82-E16552ED9513

Device           Start   End Sectors  Size Type
/dev/mtdblock0p1    64  7167    7104  3.5M Linux filesystem
/dev/mtdblock0p2  7168  7679     512  256K Linux filesystem
/dev/mtdblock0p3  7680  8063     384  192K Linux filesystem
/dev/mtdblock0p4  8064  8127      64   32K Linux filesystem
/dev/mtdblock0p5  8128  8191      64   32K Linux filesystem
/dev/mtdblock0p6  8192 16383    8192    4M Linux filesystem
/dev/mtdblock0p7 16384 32734   16351    8M Linux filesystem

 

[ZephyrNet]

Hi etho201,

 

According to the OPi5 manual, the green light will start to blink after the kernel loads.  That would mean whenever you reboot and you get the green blink, it made it past the bootloader.

 

To anyone else who can answer,

 

Does the default Armbian config output boot info to the serial console?  That might show where it gets hung up here.

 

 

[Vybearz]

Yeah, maybe installing new trunk, and on armbian-config updating the bootloader on SPI can handle with this

[steeler21]

This site worked for me!

 

https://jamesachambers.com/orange-pi-5-ssd-boot-guide/

[Werner]

35 minutes ago, steeler21 said:

https://jamesachambers.com/orange-pi-5-ssd-boot-guide/

Quote

Armbian has a similar install utility as orangepi-config.

Maybe because OPi simply forked and rebranded our config utility

[martivo]

The SPI fdisk output seems good. From the description I would also recommend to do a fresh trunk installation and also re-install the SPI. If that does not help then find another NVME drive to test with. 

[etho201]

I did a fresh install from the latest trunk and re-installed the bootloader to the SPI Flash and now everything seems to be working great. Thanks for everyone's help!

 

. /etc/os-release; echo "$PRETTY_NAME"
Armbian 23.02.0-trunk.0243 Jammy

Edited February 8, 2023 by etho201