installing Armbian Bookworm on Radxa Rock 5 ITX with NVMe m.2 SSD

[justanothernoob]

hi there,

 

I'm a complete Linux noob so please forgive my ignorance. But I do have 25+ years experience in IT so am relatively conversant with basic principles - so please be patient   I did try to search for any previous threads but couldn't find any.

 

I'm trying to setup a RADXA Rock 5 ITX with OpenMediaVault for my NAS.

I have a 2TB NVMe m.2 SSD that I'll use for the OS.

For the NAS storage I'm using 4x Western Digital 16TB SATA III drives.

 

I downloaded the Armbian 25.2.2 bootable image from https://www.armbian.com/radxa-rock-5-itx/ and used Balena Etcher (the legit version from Balena-io) to make my bootable microSD card.

When I boot, I receive an error message of "failed to mount /dev/mount/mmcblk0p1 as root file system"

I'm guessing this is because there is no emmc on this board other than what's provided for RooibOS flash?

 

Do I just need to reconfigure the Armbian Bookworm setup script to use / look for the NVMe m.2 SSD instead of the emmc? If so, is there a way to do that on a Windows PC? If not, I may just have to go with the standard RooibOS install using Armbian Noble just to get a Linux system up and running, then edit the Armbian setup script, reflash the Rock 5 ITX and start again?

 

Or is there something else I'm missing?

 

Thanks in advance for your help.

[laibsch]

7 hours ago, justanothernoob said:

I'm guessing this is because there is no emmc on this board other than what's provided for RooibOS flash?

 

Do I just need to reconfigure the Armbian Bookworm setup script to use / look for the NVMe m.2 SSD instead of the emmc? If so, is there a way to do that on a Windows PC? If not, I may just have to go with the standard RooibOS install using Armbian Noble just to get a Linux system up and running, then edit the Armbian setup script, reflash the Rock 5 ITX and start again?

 

Apologies, but what is RooibOS?  I'm sure it's got nothing to do with tea ;-)

[justanothernoob]

DOH! Typo ... RoobiOS

[laibsch]

aww, too bad.  I kinda like the tea distribution. ;-)

 

regardless, I still can't find a reference as to what it really is.

[prahal]

@laibsch, this is the Radxa Custom Debian OS that is shipped on the emmc.

 

@justanothernoobCould be I did not have this issue because my board was delivered with an empty emmc (no RoobiOS installed). Though i doubt it.

Do you have the serial console full output?

 

Also is it a typo or is the error really about
`/dev/mount/mmcblk0p1` not `/dev/mmcblk0p1`. Mind `/dev/mmcblk0p1` is the emmc partition while you should be booting from the SD card. I tet installed

 

Note also that 25.2.2 linux (current) images area lacking most devices support, while vendor 25.2 has an issue with PCIe SATA detection. THe vendor PCIe detection is fixed in latest 25.08 vendor. But that does not explain your current issue...

Can you try https://fi.mirror.armbian.de/incoming/prahal/rock-5-itx/archive/ vendor images dated after 16th of August (the ones before did not have the fix for PCIe SATA detection)?

Like https://fi.mirror.armbian.de/incoming/prahal/rock-5-itx/archive/Armbian_25.8.1_Rock-5-itx_noble_vendor_6.1.115_xfce_desktop.img.xz

 

[justanothernoob]

@prahal - I tried a number of those images but none worked. With RoobiOS I see that all of the blue lights below the SATA ports (i.e. on the underside of the board) light up as blue for a couple of seconds, then they turn off and then they flash twice ... the screen comes on and after a couple of error messages the Installation GUI starts.

 

With the images from the links you provided, I don't get the blue lights (although I do get a yellow network link light).

 

However ... in RoobiOS I'm given the option of various images to install ... including the option for "custom" - I've selected that and entered

https://fi.mirror.armbian.de/incoming/prahal/rock-5-itx/archive/Armbian_25.8.1_Rock-5-itx_bookworm_current_6.12.41_minimal.img.xz

 

This gives a circle (of death?!) and "Loading ..." in RoobiOS but I see there's flashing green light on the ethernet port - which suggests that there's activity so maybe it's just a slow download?

 

Edited 2 hours ago by justanothernoob