Orange Pi 5 Pro Not Booting with Armbian

[Ishaan]

Good day,

I have recently purchased an Orange Pi 5 Pro and want to use Armbian on it. Armbian (Debian 13 Trixie) does not boot and gives a initramfs error. I have read on erasing the SPI flash memory, but have a few questions. Will erasing the SPI flash memory affect the booting of other operating systems. Is it safe to erase the SPI flash memory? What is the issue around Armbian not booting because of the SPI flash memory? How exactly would I safely erase the SPI flash memory?

Thank You

[Werner]

6 hours ago, Ishaan said:

Will erasing the SPI flash memory affect the booting of other operating systems.

- No, it might even help to have this cleaned up. rockchip socs have a fixed boot order. If there is nothing bootable on spi, it will move on to the next target to attempt boot (like emmc or microsd).

 

Is it safe to erase the SPI flash memory?

Yes, as long as you don't need it for booting from usb or nvme which isn't the case for you (yet).

 

What is the issue around Armbian not booting because of the SPI flash memory?

Vendor code tends to be severely outdated and sometimes even cause artificial vendor lock-in, either in purpose or due to poor design. This may prevent Armbian from booting.

 

How exactly would I safely erase the SPI flash memory?

There is a tool called flasherase. However a dd if=/dev/zero to dev mtd0 should do too.

 

 

See inline comments.

 

Dirty SPI may cause this but without logs from serial console this is just a guess