Dear Readers
 

I had quite some troubles migrating my armbian system from an SD-Card (16GB) to my emmc (32GB). I'd like to sum up my journey for future travelers ;-)

I was not successful simply copying the image of the sd to the emmc and resizing the partition. It would not boot. Apparently emmc has additional boot partitions which must be set correctly.

I "repaired" the emmc with this https://wiki.odroid.com/accessory/emmc/recovery_xu4 and it booted Android all right from emmc.
I then rebooted on my SD-Card and used the nand-sata-install command to "Boot from eMMC - system on eMMC". It took some time to copy, but when booting on the emmc, still Android.
Reboot on the SD-Card again and I manually deleted the emmc-partitions (using parted, fdisk should work just as well) and created a new ext4 partition. I don't know, if the creation was necessary (it got overwritten anyway, as it should).

I then used the nand-sata-install command again and chose "Boot from eMMC - system on eMMC". After it finished I checked by mounting the new partition and it looked ok. And then it booted my system from emmc just fine.

I can't tell what the problem was initially, may be nand-sata-install got confused by the 4 partitions the Android system had made on the emmc.
 

Many thanks to all contributors of armbian, especially for the very handy nand-sata-install tool!

Regards

Ivo

That's mostly what this (now stickied) thread was about.  A bit winding (as it was WIP at the time) but the TL;DR is: just use nand-sata-install and skip advice you may find elsewhere about workarounds involving Android, etc.

 

Glad to hear you got it working, thanks for sharing your experience, and welcome to the forums!

 

And good choice on XU4.  I have 2 of them, and still think they are one of best boards around, even to this day.