Helios64 - Unable to transfer install from eMMC to SDCard

[unfnknblvbl]

Hi all,

 

I am unable to login to OMV on my Helios64. A bit of sleuthing indicates that this is because the / fs is at 100% capacity. At first, I figured I'll just transfer the system install from the 8GB SD Card I started with to the 16GB internal eMMC. Turns out past unfnknblvbl already did that, and now I need to go the other way. 

 

The documentation on the old Kobol site isn't entirely accurate about how to do this. My SDCard is /dev/mmcblk1 and even though it's formatted ext4, it simply doesn't show in armbian-config. In fact, the only device that shows in the Install menu is /dev/md127, which is the RAID array itself. I'd rather not be booting from that for obvious reasons.

Assuming that I'm a bit of a Linux noob (I know just enough to be dangerous), is anyone able to tell me what am I doing wrong?

Thanks! 😃

[eselarm]

May boot from new / known-to-work Armbian on SD-card and use command:

sudo lsblk

and/or

sudo lsblk -f

to see what is what. mmcblk numbers have swapped sometime in the past years, so indeed even if you know enough about Linux, mixing numbers might be a disater because you would overwrite the runnig installation. That might also be a reason why tooling might refuse or not list as there is a risk of having it wrong.

 

But you should clean-up the 100% full filesystem. It will take time figuring out what should be deleted, but so does going to the toilet as well. It has to be done, cannot assume there is endless space.

[unfnknblvbl]

How can I force it to boot from SD though?

[RockBian]

If it is bootable, it is supposed to boot from it. The default u-boot boots first from SD, then eMMC, then SATA.

[Marru_678]

You can't truly "force" the boot sequence on Helios64 since U-Boot already checks SD, eMMC, and SATA. The SD card isn't bootable if the eMMC is still booting.

Things to check quickly:

SD must contain a properly written raw Armbian image (dd / balenaEtcher). You can't copy files.

Check that it contains a bootloader and not simply an ext4 partition.

Before starting, turn off the power completely (warm reboots might disregard SD).

Once the computer has started, use lsblk -f to inspect the layout of the devices.

On Helios64, the mmc numbering does change, therefore tools may conceal devices to save the live rootfs from being destroyed.

If you want to be 100% sure, unplug the eMMC for a short time. If it boots, the SD is OK.
The boot sequence isn't the problem; the SD image is.