ODROID-HC4 not usable with recent Armbian images (no SATA, no USB keyboard, Petitboot broken)

[titi38]

Board: ODROID-HC4

Images tested:

Armbian_25.5.1_Odroidhc4_bookworm_current_6.12.28_minimal.img

Armbian_25.5.1_Odroidhc4_noble_current_6.12.28.img

 

Kernel versions tested: multiple (6.6.x, 6.7.x, 6.12.x) through armbian-config

 

Issues observed:

1. No USB keyboard at boot

I have tested with three different USB keyboards (all working fine on Debian/Ubuntu official images).

 

2. SATA not initialized → NAS functionality is broken

Always get:

ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)

Disks are never detected.

This makes Armbian unusable on HC4 as a NAS (which is the main purpose of the board).

3. Petitboot incompatibility and restore procedure

Armbian does not boot correctly with Petitboot (the default bootloader shipped by Hardkernel).

The Armbian documentation recommends removing Petitboot, which prevents using other distributions afterwards.

 

The official Armbian forum threads redirect to Hardkernel forum.

The tools to restore Petitboot are hosted on ppa.linuxfactory.or.kr, which has been offline for over a week !...

This effectively leaves users stuck without a working bootloader or system.

 

Expected behavior

SATA disks should be detected and initialized (as with Hardkernel’s Debian/Ubuntu 5.15 LTS images).

USB keyboards should work at boot.

Armbian should either work with Petitboot, or provide a reliable documented way to restore it.

 

At the moment, Armbian on ODROID-HC4 is unusable as a NAS due to SATA not working and Petitboot being broken.
The only working setup is using Hardkernel’s old Debian/Ubuntu images with kernel 5.15.
 

Could you please clarify:

Is HC4 still officially supported by Armbian? Do you test your releases ?

If yes, which kernel/branch should be used for stable SATA support?...

Will there be fixes for USB keyboard and Petitboot compatibility?

Thanks a lot !

[laibsch]

Thank you for letting us know and polish up our next release.  I'm sure @Igor will have a look shortly.