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 toroot=/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.