Hello Everyone,

 

I have an Orange Pi 3 and I want to wipe the default OS and replace it with Armbian.

It has some foreign default OS which appears to be Android based and without a word of English. The Armbian documentation wasn't much help because it didn't provide any instructions for this sort of hardware.

 

If any of you could give me some pointers that would be very much appreciated.

You can download the image, and follow the instructions under the header "How to start", in this page: https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-3/

It said to "Insert the SD card into the slot, connect a cable to your network if possible or a display and power your board. (First) boot (with DHCP) takes up to 35 seconds with a class 10 SD Card." Is there some kind of boot menu on an Orange Pi I'm missing? It just took me to the android based OS as if I needed to select SD card in a boot menu.  The Instructions sound just like a raspberry pi but it did't work that way. With a Raspberry Pi you normally just restore a disk image (.img file) onto a class 10 SD card and plug it all in.

Then your sd card is either corrupted or not written correctly or not properly detected by your board. When an SD card is inserted it should boot from it.

I assume the OPi3 with EMMC comes with an Chinese Android written to it...

 

 

SomeBloke, what program are you using to flash the image to the SD card? I ask because there is a plethora of options available, but not all of them apparently work with OPi3/Armbian images. I had the most success using Etcher (from Balena). I recommend using that if you're on Windows.