Cannot get Orange Pi 5 to boot

[SmoothCriminal75]

I recently bought a used OrangePi 5, when it arrived it had a working Ubuntu image on an SD card.

 

I decided to format the card and put my own image of Armbian on the card using the Armbian imager. when installed the card would no longer boot. lights on board but black screen no HDMI output.

I tried several different SD cards and different images all with the same result (A1 Sandisk cards)

 

Eventually I tried a hail mary and put an Armbian image on a really old USB thumb stick and it immediately booted and worked just fine.

 

I tried putting the OrangePi os on one of my SD cards for kicks and it gets HDMI output but is just stuck on the OrangePi splash screen

 

When I insert the SD card while running on the USB thumb drive image I can view the partitions and see that the OS image is correctly installed on the SD. 

 

I can't figure out where I'm going wrong, am I having a bootloader compatability issue with armbian?

[SmoothCriminal75]

Forgot to mention, it will boot the SD card image from a USB adapter.