OPi 5 Doesnt Boot - MTD no space

[FreddyOPi]

I have been using my OPi 5 for several months with Armbian on my NVMe ssd.  I decided to shift my SSDs around, and removed the one that was in my OPi5 and put in a new one.  I burned the latest Armbian 23.8 Bookworm Cinnamon dated Aug 31, 2023 using BalenaEtcher onto an SD card, put it in the OPi5, and it booted fine.  I did apt update and upgrade, no problems. I ran nand-sata-install hoping to transfer the system to the ssd and it failed. My memory is fuzzy due to panic setting in, but I tried the Jameschambers process to copy the system over, and then tried to boot off the ssd card, and it failed. When I tried armbian-config it failed to update the MTD and reported no space (blank MB). Then I tried booting off the SD card and it failed. I connected the USB-tty to read the console and there were errors both on the ssd and the 16 MB MTD.  So I removed the ssd, and I still get an error and it will not boot off the SD card.  I have attached the console output for the condition with no ssd card, and failing to boot.

 

Can anyone help me correct this boot problem? I think the MTD is somehow corrupted and needs to be reloaded but I don't know how to do it.

OPi5BootFail.txt

[FreddyOPi]

What I have done so far, which still doesn't work:

1. Flash new, clean Armbian image onto SD card, and boot from that

2. on the command line enter $ "sudo parted -l" which will show the device

3. on the command line enter $ "$ sudo fsck -y /dev/mtdblock0" which gave me the error ext2fs_open2: Bad magic number in super-block

4. on the command line enter $ "armbian-config", select System, select Install, select 7 Install/Update the bootloader on MTD Flash and wait, and this was successful (no errors)

5. reinstalled NVMe ssd, removed SD card, and it would not boot, reinstalled SD card and it would not boot.

6. Flash another new, clean Armbian image onto SD card, and boot from that

7. reformatted mtdblock0, here are the commands-

reddy@orangepi5:~$ sudo mkfs -t ext2 /dev/mtdblock0
mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Found a gpt partition table in /dev/mtdblock0
Proceed anyway? (y,N) y
Creating filesystem with 16384 1k blocks and 4096 inodes
Filesystem UUID: fcdda797-0a6f-4dff-b3e1-49825625a26e
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
8193

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

8. ran armbian-config; Install to/update boot loader; Boot from MTD Flash - system on SATA, USB or NVMe  I now get the following error

 

Warning

There is not enough free capacity on /dev/.

Please check your device.

 

9. I can Install/Update the bootloader on MTD Flash

 

Disks shows it as a 17 MB Block Device, contents unknown

 

GParted now shows the device as 16 MB, with 7 partitions that look ok, except filesystem is unknown

 

I can now reboot without a fresh armbian image, but still have to keep the SD card in the computer.

 

 

[Werner]

Maybe armbian-install does not get that you messed with mtd0  beforehand. When I attached my nvme and used armbian-install everything worked flawless including mtd writing. Since I assume it came empty from factory I'd suggest to zero it as well and retry using armbian-install.

 

 

 

 

 

On 9/28/2023 at 3:15 PM, FreddyOPi said:

nand-sata-install

That is the old name of now armbian-install. It is just a symlink but keep in mind using the old command is considered deprecated and might be removed entirely in future.

 

On 9/28/2023 at 3:15 PM, FreddyOPi said:

Bookworm Cinnamon

I assume you are aware but just in case not you will have trouble with hw acceleration in this configuration. For now only Jammy Gnome offers - with the PPAs mentioned on download page in place - this.

 

On 9/28/2023 at 3:15 PM, FreddyOPi said:

ssd

Are you using an SSD or an actual NVMe? AFAIK you need some dtbo to support SSDs while real NVMes work OOB.

[FreddyOPi]

Werner - thanks for your reply. I think I was just confusing myself with old instructions. This morning I used the instructions posted here-

 

by StudioArkhein, specifically this one:

https://fiddlehack.wordpress.com/2023/07/07/installing-armbian-on-the-orange-pi-5/

and it worked fine. I don't know for sure what I did wrong, but I may have caused the problem by not being patient and shutting off the OPi5 while the Install/Update the bootloader on MTD Flash command was still writing to the mtd. It started working better once I reformatted mtd as explained above. To answer your questions-

Thanks for clarifying that armbian-config is the only script to run.

Cinnamon is working fine, even playing YouTube videos. I had previously used Jammy Gnome, but since the Cinnamon release was shown in the main window of the download page I tried it and liked it.

Its a PCIe NVMe 2230 SSD - I guess the world has moved past TLAs (three letter acronyms) and now I need to use four letter acronyms. 😉