just curious if there's a quick way to manipulate an existing Armbian build to have separate /boot and / partitions on my SD card, without needing to setup an Ubuntu build environment to compile everything myself. It's really the only thing I'd want to change about the pre-built image, and would like to avoid setting up the Ubuntu build box if I can. Thanks!

Possible, but you will need to have some Linux box to move partitions around with Parted.

 

http://askubuntu.com/questions/147132/move-ext4-partition

https://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/html_chapter/parted_2.html

 

Another option is to mount or boot current image, create new (virtual or real) one with two partition, mount and rsync it over. Make sure you that your /boot is going to first partition and that you write a boot loader to new image - or bin copy (DD) from one image to anther.

And one more idea:

 

1. Make two boot images.

2. Boot one and wait until everything is done

3. Plug second SD card into board via USB card reader

4. Re-partition this card (usually it will be /dev/sda), create one cca. 10Mb FAT boot and the rest EXT4 for root

5. Run nand-sata-install and install system to /dev/sda2

6. Copy /boot to FAT boot partition, alter boot.cmd -> point root to /dev/mmcblk0p2

7. Recreate boot script on this first boot partition

8. Execute: sync & power off

9. Exchange cards and boot with this newly created "two partition SD card"

Thanks for the suggestions, Igor. By the time I saw your responses, I had already setup an Ubuntu virtual machine on my PC to build a two partition image for the Banana Pi. Was much more painless than I expected. But this is good to know for future reference. I like having /boot and / on separate partitions simply because I can more easily change the filesystem of root and encrypt it, post installation.