Trixie/Rock 5B+ - Can't burn it on my nvme drive

[Tantalum]

Hello

 

I have burned bookworm onto a sd card,booted on it with a Rock 5B+ and installed the bootloader on the SPI flash of the board and transferred the OS to the nvme drive.

 

Now I I'm trying to install the new trixie image, but I can't burn it on my nvme drive.

 

With USBImage it does not work. It doesn't detect my nvme drive installed on my USB adapter.

With belena Etcher it throws an error during the validation of the image.

Win32Imager doesn't load at all on Windows 11.

 

I don't know which other tool (Windows) I could use.

 

I'm stuck. How can I boot again from my SD card on a Rock 5b+?

[Werner]

Just boot from microsd and then use armbian-install to move image to spi/nvme directly attached?

[Tantalum]

But it doesn't boot from the SD card anymore 😕

 

The bootloader is expecting the OS on the NVME drive.

[Werner]

Can you provide logs?

[Tantalum]

Logs from what?

It doesn't boot from SD, I have a blank screen.

 

Should I erase the SPI ROM to make it boot from the SD again?

https://docs.radxa.com/en/rock5/rock5b/low-level-dev/install-os/rkdevtool_spi

[Werner]

7 minutes ago, Tantalum said:

Should I erase the SPI ROM to make it boot from the SD again?

This should work too.

 

Debug boot issues: https://debug.armbian.de

 

Related perhaps: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8994

[Tantalum]

I have erased the SPI ROM.

It boots from the SD Card now, thanks :-)

 

But now I have another problem 😕

 

It boots, it start to load Trixie, but after 30s it get stuck here:

 

 

Edited 18 hours ago by Tantalum

[Werner]

edit /boot/armbianEnv.txt and set verbosity to 7 to get an idea about what happens inside.

[Tantalum]

I can't mount the SD card to do the modification...

It says the GPT table is corrupt. Well that may explains why belenaEtcher throws an error. I used USBImage instead, it doesn't throw an error but the main GPT table is still corrupt.

I have tested with 2 different SD cards.

 

I believe there is a problem with these Trixie (Desktop) images for Rock 5b+.

(Yes I have checked the checksum after the download)

 

I'm currently downloading the older bookworm image to check if it works, and that there is no hardware issue.

Edited 16 hours ago by Tantalum

[Igor]

Try from here: https://fi.mirror.armbian.de/dl/rock-5b-plus/archive/

[Tantalum]

Still not.

Debian starts to load but then gets stuck (see photo above).

 

I have tested again with a bookworm image and it worked.

 

So there may be something wrong with the trixie image unfortunately 😕

[Tantalum]

As suggested by Werner, I have connected my computer to the board over UART.

I have got this as output.

Not sure if it helps.

 

Quote

U-Boot SPL 2025.10_armbian-2025.10-Se50b-P0eb7-Hdbe0-Vfd58-Bbf55-R448a (Nov 24 2025 - 08:35:51 +0000)
Trying to boot from MMC2
## Checking hash(es) for config config-1 ... OK
## Checking hash(es) for Image atf-1 ... sha256+ OK
## Checking hash(es) for Image u-boot ... sha256+ OK
## Checking hash(es) for Image fdt-1 ... sha256+ OK
## Checking hash(es) for Image atf-2 ... sha256+ OK
## Checking hash(es) for Image atf-3 ... sha256+ OK
INFO:    Preloader serial: 2
NOTICE:  BL31: v2.3():v2.3-868-g040d2de11:derrick.huang, fwver: v1.48
NOTICE:  BL31: Built : 15:02:44, Dec 19 2024
INFO:    spec: 0x1
INFO:    code: 0x88
INFO:    ext 32k is not valid
INFO:    ddr: stride-en 4CH
INFO:    GICv3 without legacy support detected.
INFO:    ARM GICv3 driver initialized in EL3
INFO:    valid_cpu_msk=0xff bcore0_rst = 0x0, bcore1_rst = 0x0
INFO:    l3 cache partition cfg-0
INFO:    system boots from cpu-hwid-0
INFO:    bypass memory repair
INFO:    idle_st=0x21fff, pd_st=0x11fff9, repair_st=0xfff70001
INFO:    dfs DDR fsp_params[0].freq_mhz= 2400MHz
INFO:    dfs DDR fsp_params[1].freq_mhz= 534MHz
INFO:    dfs DDR fsp_params[2].freq_mhz= 1320MHz
INFO:    dfs DDR fsp_params[3].freq_mhz= 1968MHz
INFO:    BL31: Initialising Exception Handling Framework
INFO:    BL31: Initializing runtime services
WARNING: No OPTEE provided by BL2 boot loader, Booting device without OPTEE initialization. SMC`s destined for OPTEE will return SMC_UNK
ERROR:   Error initializing runtime service opteed_fast
INFO:    BL31: Preparing for EL3 exit to normal world
INFO:    Entry point address = 0xa00000
INFO:    SPSR = 0x3c9

U-Boot 2025.10_armbian-2025.10-Se50b-P0eb7-Hdbe0-Vfd58-Bbf55-R448a (Nov 24 2025 - 08:35:51 +0000)

Model: Radxa ROCK 5B
SoC:   RK3588
DRAM:  16 GiB
Core:  380 devices, 34 uclasses, devicetree: separate
MMC:   mmc@fe2c0000: 1, mmc@fe2d0000: 2, mmc@fe2e0000: 0
Loading Environment from SPIFlash... SF: Detected xt25f128 with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 16 MiB
*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

In:    serial@feb50000
Out:   serial@feb50000
Err:   serial@feb50000
Model: Radxa ROCK 5B
SoC:   RK3588
rockchip_dnl_key_pressed: no saradc device found
Net:   No ethernet found.
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Scanning for bootflows in all bootdevs
Seq  Method       State   Uclass    Part  Name                      Filename
---  -----------  ------  --------  ----  ------------------------  ----------------
Scanning global bootmeth 'efi_mgr':
Card did not respond to voltage select! : -110
Card did not respond to voltage select! : -110
Cannot persist EFI variables without system partition
  0  efi_mgr      ready   (none)       0  <NULL>
** Booting bootflow '<NULL>' with efi_mgr
Loading Boot0000 'mmc 1' failed
EFI boot manager: Cannot load any image
Boot failed (err=-14)
Scanning bootdev 'mmc@fe2c0000.bootdev':
  1  script       ready   mmc          1  mmc@fe2c0000.bootdev.part /boot/boot.scr
** Booting bootflow 'mmc@fe2c0000.bootdev.part_1' with script
Boot script loaded from mmc 1:1
217 bytes read in 4 ms (52.7 KiB/s)
22006951 bytes read in 1834 ms (11.4 MiB/s)
49017344 bytes read in 4080 ms (11.5 MiB/s)
272910 bytes read in 34 ms (7.7 MiB/s)
Working FDT set to 12000000
441 bytes read in 46 ms (8.8 KiB/s)
Applying kernel provided DT overlay rockchip-rk3588-panthor-gpu.dtbo
Trying kaslrseed command... Info: Unknown command can be safely ignored since kaslrseed does not apply to all boards.
Unknown command 'kaslrseed' - try 'help'
## Loading init Ramdisk from Legacy Image at 12180000 ...
   Image Name:   uInitrd
   Image Type:   AArch64 Linux RAMDisk Image (gzip compressed)
   Data Size:    22006887 Bytes = 21 MiB
   Load Address: 00000000
   Entry Point:  00000000
   Verifying Checksum ... OK
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 12000000
   Booting using the fdt blob at 0x12000000
Working FDT set to 12000000
   Loading Ramdisk to eb303000, end ec7ffc67 ... OK
   Loading Device Tree to 00000000ecb05000, end 00000000ecbaffff ... OK
Working FDT set to ecb05000

Starting kernel ...

 

 

[eselarm]

From the log I see:

 

Model: Radxa ROCK 5B

272910 bytes read in 34 ms (7.7 MiB/s)

 

I would expect Radxa ROCK 5B+

Or is it 1 DTB nowadays?

The bytes read should represent the DTB file that is loaded, I use extlinux so can see what files are loaded, seems this 2025.10 build does not show this.

Also  be aware it first tries EFI booting, it fails as one can see, so no issue here, but I got confused on my ROCK5B (not the newer upgraded + board) because I had an NVME connectod with a working bootaa64.efi grub.cfg etc as well, so it booted something else than the image from SD-card. I was my own tuned rootfs, so was rather easy to see, but other occasion I did not notice and wasted a lot of time.

 

For this case, what does the kernel spit out ?

set loglevel to 7 in armbianEnv.txt 

[Tantalum]

I don't know how to set loglevel to 7 in armbianEnv.txt 😕

 

On Windows after flashing the SD card, I don't have access to the files (ext4 partition probably).

 

And on my Linux VM I'm not able to mount the SD card 😕

 

[eselarm]

2 minutes ago, Tantalum said:

And on my Linux VM I'm not able to mount the SD card 😕

It gets problematic if it is only Windows that is available. In the past I advised people to download Knoppix and boot the PC with that so you have full control. But nowadays SecureBoot might already be a showstopper, unless you know how to deal with it. So your best Linux is probably the ROCK5 with Armbian Bookworm. You can use that to edit the Trixie SD-card. Or upgrade bookworm in-place to Trixie, I have done it more than 10 times in 2025H2, still 1 or 2 computers to go.