Orange Pi 5 won’t boot from SSD after armbian-install

[Renoria]

Hi guys,

 

First post here, I successfully managed to flash and boot Armbian 25.8.2 (Bookworm Minimal) from an SD card. Everything was working great, HDMI output and network included.

 

I then ran “sudo armbian-install” and selected Option 4 to move the system to my NVMe SSD and make it boot from there. The process itself completed without errors.

 

However, after shutting down and removing the SD card and powering on again the system doesn’t boot. I have the red LED turned on however the green LED that was previously flickering doesn’t turn on. There’s also no HDMI output and the board doesn’t connect to the network. 

 

I tried inserting the SD card and the system does boot from that just fine.

 

Where did I screw up? Appreciate the help!

[laibsch]

sounds like a genuine bug and not an error on your end.

 

@Efe Çetin Can you confirm the issue?

[Igor]

I tested self build opi5 few days ago and there was no problem installing and booting from nvme, legacy kernel, Noble Gnome desktop. Make sure you select second option when updating SPI bootloader (not sata).

[Renoria]

Hi @Igor, that’s what I selected (not the sata loader) and then ext4 but no luck. 

[Igor]

2 minutes ago, Renoria said:

and then ext4 but no luck. 

Is SSD in good shape and is SPI flash o.k. ... logs would tell more.

[Renoria]

@Igor could you help how to figure out if both SSD, SPI flash are ok? happy to provide logs as well, which to share?

[Werner]

4 hours ago, Renoria said:

which to share?

The logs you can aquire this way: https://debug.armbian.de

 

[Efe Çetin]

On 11/11/2025 at 7:08 AM, Renoria said:

I tried inserting the SD card and the system does boot from that just fine.

 

Could you try to write SPI image to spi flash manually? (not the sata one) Also, can you send the content of /boot/armbianEnv.txt which is located in the ssd.

[Renoria]

20 hours ago, Efe Çetin said:

Could you try to write SPI image to spi flash manually? (not the sata one) Also, can you send the content of /boot/armbianEnv.txt which is located in the ssd.

Hi @Efe Çetin, how do I write SPI image manually?

as for the content inside SSD, this is what it shows:
 

cat /mnt/boot/armbianEnv.txt

verbosity=1
bootlogo=false
console=both
extraargs=cma=256M
overlay_prefix=rockchip-rk3588
fdtfile=rockchip/rk3588s-orangepi-5.dtb
rootdev=UUID=98220746-d581-4d83-9e96-0f31702ef529
rootfstype=ext4
usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u

Thanks in advance!

Edited November 13 by Renoria

[Renoria]

in the meantime I tried moving OS to SSD and kept bootloader in the SD using armbian install option 1 and it works fine…

[Efe Çetin]

7 hours ago, Renoria said:

Hi @Efe Çetin, how do I write SPI image manually?

Choose install/update bootloader on spi flash option on armbian-install. Some uart logs could be useful if you have usb-ttl converter stuff

[jimt]

I got my Orange Pi 5 out of the drawer today and discovered that it would not boot from NVMe after armbian-install if I used btrfs, but it boots fine with ext4. I tried both the Minimal/IOT Ubuntu 24.04 and 25.11.1 Trixie Minimal/IOT images with 6.1.x kernels. (I updated each to 25.11.2 before doing the armbian-install of both the system and the mtd image.)

P.S.  A minor quibble, but it was annoying that the numbering of the continents/countries during setup and the ordering of the SPI bootloader options during armbian-install were different between the Trixie and Noble images. I had to actually read. 🙈

[eselarm]

5 hours ago, jimt said:

I got my Orange Pi 5 out of the drawer today and discovered that it would not boot from NVMe after armbian-install if I used btrfs, but it boots fine with ext4. I tried both the Minimal/IOT Ubuntu 24.04 and 25.11.1 Trixie Minimal/IOT images with 6.1.x kernels. (I updated each to 25.11.2 before doing the armbian-install of both the system and the mtd image.)

I am afraid you need to dig deeper than those 'convenience installers'. I never used armbian-install but have been running Armbian from Btrfs for several years. It is easy and low failure risk if just simple SBC with only SD-card like NanoPi-NEO, but you get many options where various modern U-Boot builds / bootloaders can go wrong. Do the math permutation and you will realize.

 

I know Armbian can be booted from single Btrfs formatted partition, but it meant full custom own U-Boot and own partition setup. That also involves whether you use subvolumes or not and whether you set 1 as default, other then the root of the filesystem ( ID <= 5 is that). Also features, I use zstd compression, but I am not 100% if the whole chain does also support it. 

 

So you need serial console cable to see/log what is going on and also set kernel loglevel to 7 (in armbianEnv.txt).

 

It would also help if you post sha256sum of image you tested/used. That allows others like myself to quickly check/reproduce in virtual machine or so (I don't have OPi5) and not pick a newer build or so next week when time to help you.

Edited 50 minutes ago by eselarm