Oram/Pi5 Boot from NVMe?

Using Zynthian
57

I bought the right drive from my local second hand computer shop and now have Zynthian booting from NVMe. Here is what I did and what still needs to be done in Zynthian software:

  • Build a RPi5 *GB + active heatsink + Pimoroni NVMe Base + PC Specialist G930E 256GB M.2 NVMe
  • Add power - I got 4 long and 4 short green LED pulses indicating “Unsupported board type”. It needed a bootloader update…
  • Used Raspberry Pi Imager to flash USB+NVMe bootloader to a spare uSD card
  • Inserted the uSD with bootloader in RPi5 and powered - after a few seconds the green LED flashes continuously to indicate success
  • You could write the Zynthian OS directly to the NVMe - I didn’t have this facility so uses ZynthianOS do do so thus:
  • Used dd or Raspberry Pi Imager to flash 2024-05-22-zynthianos-bookworm-aarch64-oram-2405 to 32GB uSD
  • Booted RPi5 with ZynthianOS uSD
  • Waited for reboot - note, Zynthian will be in a restart loop due to no audio - don’t worry yet…
  • Connected network cable to RPi5
  • ssh to Rpi5 using ssh root@zynthian
  • Run raspi-config and select 6. Advanced Options, A4 Boot Order, B2 NVMe/USB Boot
  • wget https://os.zynthian.org/test/2024-05-22-zynthianos-bookworm-aarch64-oram-2405.zip
  • unzip 2024-05-22-zynthianos-bookworm-aarch64-oram-2405.zip
  • dd if=2024-05-22-zynthianos-bookworm-aarch64-oram-2405.img of=/dev/nvme0n1
  • mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /media
  • nano /media/cmdline.txt - change root parameter to root=/dev/nvme0n1p2 then ctrl+x to exit (I prefer vim but most users won’t.)
  • reboot - should now boot to ZynthianOS from NVMe
  • Connect web browser to http:\zynthian and set audio to Dummies. (I didn’t do this earlier because it would have set it on the uSD and would need doing again.
  • Reboot

These steps have been written mostly from memory and with some modification from what I actually did, which is not good in an old codger like me so there maybe errors. Please report back so that we can update this guide.

[Edit] Removed info about issue editing root partition mount point - fixed.
[Edit] Fixed path to NVMe drive.

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