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 yesterday at 10:49 AM by eselarm

[jimt]

```
❯ sha256sum Armbian_25.11.1_Orangepi5*img
6cb1e6ed97dc41170db8406b056ecbf422f8801261e13b07da4dae3b45a81ab3  Armbian_25.11.1_Orangepi5_noble_vendor_6.1.115_minimal.img
5781fec6fa812fca1f99e79a42b0312bf4403a2a590dec84458dcfbabd28cd13  Armbian_25.11.1_Orangepi5_trixie_vendor_6.1.115_minimal.img

```

[eselarm]

2 hours ago, jimt said:

5781fec6fa812fca1f99e79a42b0312bf4403a2a590dec84458dcfbabd28cd13  Armbian_25.11.1_Orangepi5_trixie_vendor_6.1.115_minimal.img

U-Boot SPL 2025.10_armbian-2025.10-Se50b-P24f2-Hae98-V38b0-Bbf55-R448a (Nov 19 2025 - 09:08:53 +0000)
   which is in that image, has no btrfs support

 

I saw for example on my NanoPi-R6C using:

U-Boot SPL 2026.01-rc2_armbian-2026.01-rc2-S365a-Pb445-He3cc-V062a-Bbf55-R448a (Dec 03 2025 - 04:31:42 +0000)
   that it has btrfs support, so can load kernel etc directly from the rootfs partition when it is btrfs formatted.

 

You can first write a newer U-Boot in SPI-Flash, then it should work.
 

Edited 18 hours ago by eselarm

[jimt]

Thanks!

 

It would be helpful if armbian-install somehow checked that before offering the btrfs option.

 

(This is just an interim solution until I figure out what went wrong with a recent Rock 5B upgrade that keeps it from booting and took many of my home services offline. So I will live with ext4 for now, but I thought I should report the problem.)

[eselarm]

7 hours ago, jimt said:

It would be helpful if armbian-install somehow checked that before offering the btrfs option.

There a more important things to do (first). Like even creating a package for the OPI5 as a quick scan reveals there is none. So currently an option is to compile U-Boot yourself with added Btrfs support. And/or also do that on github and make pull request. Over time, more U-Boot will support Btrfs I guess, so how do you think people should spent their time. I did look into armbian-install but it is not according to my wishes/methods. It should work, but more work for me to revert/change than just use  manual rsync and btrfs options as I want it. I have some backup/cloning scripting that fits Opensuse methods, not Debian.

 

Your other option is to simply install/copy manually and maintain an extra boot/1st partition, FAT formatted. Several old installs do it like that and it is anyway you have to deal with for 'normal' UEFI computers. So that is why I do that. For simple/cheap/headless SBCs, just U-Boot and single partition is very much preferred I think, as that means less objects to maintain and also it allows seamless systemd-nspawn startup/run. That is very handy method of doing things with images. As with multiple partition you need losetup first and select/mount rootfs partition as well manually. 

I also use extra 1stFAT so it is easier to experiment and switch bootloader and various boot methods/files.

 

Or build your own image with Armbian build, then 1 linux commandline, 'push-button', if you would select /dev/mmcblk0 as image target and have your buildhost running from NVME.

 

Also note that there is the tool btrfs-convert, it works on various SBC images, if you also change/fix boot settings. For Armbian, I think only change is the rootfstype= line in armbianEnv.txt

And what works for several UEFI machines is that you add the boot partitions at the end, so you can just shrink rootfs partition a bit, no complete recreate, that might save time when full 4TB HDD. It must have the correct type then so 0xEF00 (ESP), so Windows oriented users will easily get in trouble. Not sure if that also works for Linux only method, seems 0xEA00, but would expect that.

Anyway, this is all fixing afterwards options, it of course won't play nice with Ext4 auto expand filesystem method in every SBC image nowadays (eating your SD-card, you never manage to undo).