I downloaded the Armbian Buster image from the downloads section of armbian.com and flashed the image to an sd card, as instructed. I have installed sddm, gnome, etc in addition to running apt update & apt upgrade and creating a new user. The system looks good and I planned on using nand-sata-install to write the OS to my emmc .. according to everything I have found, executing nand-sata-install from the root prompt gives a screen that has 3 choices, one of which is "Boot from emmc; system on emmc"

 

Instead, this is what I get:

1     Boot from SD   -   system on SATA, eMMC or NVMe

5     Install/Update the Bootloader on SD/eMMC

 

I just want to be certain - does (1) install to my eMMC and then (5) update the bootloader so that my system then boots from the eMMC? Also, does the original system remain on the SD card unchanged (in other words, if I screw up the system after install to the eMMC, can I zero it out and "redo" the install from my SD card?

 

Thanks. I am not quite a noob as I've been using linux for a few years, but it throws me for a bit of a loop when the experience doesn't quite match the documentation .. I'm not sure of myself enough to know when something is a critical difference or not!

 

Thanks.

Your unknown board may or may not be able to boot from eMMC. Some need boot loader stored on sd, others not.