OS cannot be installed

[aosos]

I tried installing the OS using SD card and EMMC, but both failed.

Orange Pi OS (Arch) on the official website ran normally.

However, I installed focal_desktop_xfce or jammy_desktop_gnome from Ubuntu Image, but they all failed.

After inserting the image into the SD card, the symptom is a black screen and no booting.

Does it only support SSD?

 

 

 

Because it is entered through a translator, there may be unnatural sentences. If you reply about that, I will get back to you.

[Igor]

1 hour ago, aosos said:

Orange Pi OS (Arch) on the official website ran normally.

 

Orangepi OS (Arch) is custom / re-branded Manjaro and Manjaro is not doing much else then shipping (selling) their Arch derived OS while taking our and community work on kernel maintainace. This is the story how Orangepi "supports" open source - by primarily supporting code dealers that already mainly have negative contribution to open source development. But who cares other then small group of people called "developers"?

In general, HW vendors have interest to block or at least control other OS providers and it is possible they purposefully compiled SPI boot-loader to not load anything else then their OS. This would explain why you can't load our OS. Manjaro already provided (or tried to) this "solution" to Pine64, so average users would have troubles changing OS. Details: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ 

 

For us, this is easy to work-around, but bulk of people might still need to stick to their official promo/spy/pirate-ware.

 

Solution?

Debian based OS:
 

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mtd-utils
sudo flash_eraseall /dev/mtd0

 

Arch based OS:

sudo pacman -Syy
sudo pacman -S mtd-utils
sudo flash_erase /dev/mtd0

 

Then boot armbian from SD card and run:
 

sudo armbian-install

 

And choose "update MTD boot-loader" or "Install it to NVME", which will also update boot-loader and transfer image to SSD. Tested right now with Opi5 lying on my desk.

[Trinom]

I just tried the suggested steps on my new Orange Pi 5 Max (the newest board with RK3588) and unfortunatelly, it doesn't work. I followed every single step (using Debian), erased mtd0, but the Raspbian never booted when I swapped the SD cards. Indicator has solid cyan color (the same color as if no card is present). Apparently it's looking for something extra on the SD card, which it can't find, so it doesn't boot at all.

[Werner]

9 hours ago, Trinom said:

Raspbian

I doubt that Raspian supports this board.

[Igor]

9 hours ago, Trinom said:

Orange Pi 5 Max

 

For all those boards you need a dedicated image in order to boot it. This is not a PC or Raspberry Pi. If image is not here
https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Standard support&tx_maker=xunlong

you will need to stick to terrible OS provided by Orangepi until someone will adopt this hardware https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Adding-Board-Family/

[Trinom]

Technically, 5Max is a combination of 5Plus and 5B (RK3588 CPU and 5B peripherals). So if 5B and 5Plus is supported, 5Max should be supported as well, right? Or do they do something stupid with a bootloader? I don't think so, as their images work between different 5-series boards just fine.

I will probably further investigate their SW tools they provide for burning the image onto SD/EMMC/SSD.

[SteeMan]

2 hours ago, Trinom said:

So if 5B and 5Plus is supported, 5Max should be supported as well, right?

Not right at all.  Every SBC that has different hardware configuration requires a different dtb file that describes the hardware to the Linux kernel.  So every SBC needs it's own build ( sometimes dtb overlays can be used to shortcut this).  And similar issues can exist at the uboot level too.  

[notheld]

Hello everyone. this is my first post so please forgive me if I need to create a new post or if it makes sense to use this tread.

 

I have a pi 5 plus 16gb and I managed to install the image Armbian_24.8.1_Orangepi5-plus_noble_vendor_6.1.75_gnome-kisak_desktop.img on the SD card and emmc. But it doesn't work on the pcie, I'm using the wd black SN750 SE. I can't understand why this is happening.

 

I can run Joshua's ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img.xz image in nvme and it works perfectly, but I wanted to be able to run the armbian image because I really like the project.

So using SD crad I ran the commands to delete /dev/mtd0 and ran the armbian-install command to install it on nvme. But it didn't work in the same way and now Joshua's image has also stopped working.Armbian starts to run but doesn't finish booting and is stuck waiting for some action. This is the boot log:

done.
Begin: Mounting root file system ... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... done.
Begin: Running /scripts/local-premount ... Scanning for Btrfs filesystems
done.
Loading, please wait...
Starting systemd-udevd version 255.4-1ubuntu8.4
Begin: Loading essential drivers ... done.
Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ...

BusyBox v1.36.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.36.1-6ubuntu3.1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)

To get Joshua's image working again, I had to redo the manufacturer's SPI flush using the files from this link https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19SMZHj1Y8l_Vvr6_SMDHYdJHi41hMgsI.

 

I'm applying the rk3588_linux_pcie.cfg and MiniLoaderAll.bin configuration and putting rkspi_loader in uboot. By doing this, nvme worked again with the Joshua image and Armbian did not.

Whenever I delete the contents of /dev/mtd0 everything stops working, only the SD card works, emmc and nvme stop working, not just the armbian images but any image I try to use. 

I tried to use only the option update MTD boot-loader and then Install it to NVME I invested a whole day trying to solve this but I was unsuccessful, I tried several different ways but the result is always the same.

Please, would anyone have any different ideas or tell me what I'm doing wrong? I've run out of ideas.

[Werner]

Just guessing. Sometimes armbian-install seem to fail to populate /boot or the UUID of the nvme is wrong.

Try this: clear mtd and nvme, boot from fresh image from microsd, maybe remove emmc if not needed.

 

Do armbian-install and let it move OS to nvme and flash spi.

Do not reboot. Mount the nvme again somewhere and check if /boot is populated. If not, copy everything manually from microsd/boot to nvme/boot, then use lsblk or similar command to get the uuid of the nvme and edit the freshly copied armbianEnv.txt to match the uuid.

If /boot on nvme is populated already make sure the uuid is correct.

 

Then shutdown, unplug, remove sd and power up again.

 

For best chances debugging boot issues set verbosity to 7 in armbianEnv.txt and check the video at https://debug.armbian.de

 

[notheld]

Thank you very much for your reply, Werner.

 

Everything is working now. It was necessary to copy the /boot of the SD card to the /boot of the nvme as you suggested. By doing this and changing the UUID to the correct one everything worked. 

Thank you very much for your help!!! Now I can use armbian on my nvme as I always wanted.

 

But only one strange behavior remained, if I perform a reboot I am redirected to the BusyBox again and running a blkid does not show the UUID of the nvme. It seems that nvme is not recognized. But if I remove the power cable and put it back in, everything is back to normal. I just found this behavior very curious but it won't affect my use, I just always have to turn it off and on again if I need to reboot.

[Werner]

Odd. I have an OPi5 with nvme and vendor kernel as well and it survives reboots. It is not up to date though. Also cannot check on which version it is atm.