July 15, 20233 yr I have been looking around for a way to boot OrangePi5b from the eMMC drive while a blank for formatted SD Card is inserted for extra storage space. I dd wrote the debian server image to flash, booted and got no display, connected by ssh and it does recognized the eMMC storage. Download Armbian-legacy-bookworm image and dd'd that to the EMMC and it boots with a working display. Great, did a lot of work setting up Xorg with task-xfce4-desktop, xfce4-goodies, pulseaudio, firefox-esr, brave. gtkterm, tigervnc-viewer, remmina, wine32 for winbox, winbox and all working but was not able to find a way to boot with the SD card inserted. After checking many hints online, all did not work including dd'ing over some parts of the SD card and changing the UUID trying various options in armbian-install and armbian-config. I finally came up with a partial (not clean) solution which was to leave the boot partition on the SD card and have it boot to the MMC drive by changing the UUID target in the SD /boot partition and making the rest of the card an ext4 linux partition for storage/removable storage. I installed Armbian to the flash, using either the legacy default image or one I made from the eMMC drive, so this boots to the SD card. Boot without the flash to the eMMC drive, put in the flash, mount p2 to /mnt and p1 to /mnt/boot. Then cp /boot/armbianEnv.txt /mnt/boot which copies the eMMC startup UUID to the flash boot. umount /mnt/boot and /boot used gparted to delete p2 and reformat as linux ext4. Then modify /etc/fstab on the EMMC card as... .. you could also use the UUID off the SD card but for flexibility of using different cards I also tried it by partition number. My extra storage is called /raid5 because I have a couple Dell servers running FreeBSD and Debian that I use for running VM's and as desktops so it's just easy to remember my extra storage is called /raid5 on all platforms but it could be named anything. Use the noauto examples to disable automatic mount at boot. #UUID=42818470-0ff3-41a1-84c0-85aac28901dc /raid5 ext4 defaults,noauto 0 2 # next line works for parition2 on any SD card, if boot setup properly /dev/mmcblk1p2 /raid5 ext4 defaults 0 2 #/dev/mmcblk1p2 /raid5 ext4 defaults,noauto 0 2 Disk free shows up like this... a little non-standard since /boot is mounted from the SD Card not the EMMC, but take the card out it boots from the EMMC perfectly, so it works well enough though doesn't seem to be a clean solution. root@orangepi5:/boot# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on udev 3923712 0 3923712 0% /dev tmpfs 813080 11300 801780 2% /run /dev/mmcblk0p2 59222844 7776916 50808200 14% / tmpfs 4065392 0 4065392 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock tmpfs 4065392 8 4065384 1% /tmp /dev/mmcblk1p1 261864 106300 155564 41% /boot /dev/mmcblk1p2 122001932 24 115758376 1% /raid5 /dev/zram1 47960 11272 33104 26% /var/log tmpfs 813076 16 813060 1% /run/user/0 Please if anyone has a better solution to boot from the EMMC on OrangePi5b with a blank SD Card inserted let me know! sjohn
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