I received a Helios4 and was finally able to get it to boot.  As per instructions, I booted from microSD and flashed the latest Armbian image to sda1 via the nand-sata-install command.  This reboots fine now, but only with the microSD-card present and the SW1 dipswitch set to "SD card boot mode".  Is anybody here using "SPI NOR Flash" or "SATA1" boot mode to get rid of the microSD card? I am bit handicapped here since my serial port on the microUSB only comes up maybe 1 in 10 times.  I wonder if it's worn out or if I am simply doing something wrong.

 

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Unfortunately I don't have experience with the onboard flash, but I've never had an issue with the serial port. 

 

You've tried different cables i assume?

Thank you for your quick answer, Jimbolaya.

Yes, I did try different cables all with the same result.

 

I wonder if there is another way to access the serial console, J13 perhaps?  Albeit with some required soldering, I suppose.  Then remains the question of which headers exactly relate to GND, TX and RX.

With the latest changes in Armbian and most importantly the update of u-boot to v2025.10 for Helios4, it is now possible to boot SATA and USB from u-boot flashed to SPI NOR flash, with the dip switch set to SPI boot mode.  This even includes booting straight from u-boot to btrfs now.

Hello,

I ruun an Helios4 myself, and I've been struck by the kernel image size issue some time ago. I managed to recover using an old version, but now need to upgrade... I foolishly tried an 'apt update', which obviously end up in a non booting board. 

I manage to get it boot with the latest version on SD, but can not manage to make it work from SPI...

 

Could you please explain how to get the updated u-boot loaded into SPI ? No try using nand-sata-install I've made make a difference. 

 

 

small update...

last tries I've made:

with an SD card loaded with armbian 26.2 (from Armbian archives) and DIP on SD, the boot is ok, boot is U-Boot 2025.10_armbian-2025.10-Se50b-P915a-H3623-V44f7-B2eb2-R448a. However, no option to load bootloader in SPI present in nand-sata-install, most probably because no SPI block listed in lsblk output. nan-sata-install complains that the command line is incomplete and request to try option 'help', but I could not figure how to get to the help, any common option passing I've tried did not worked.

I tried to get to the initial install procedure from Kobol, modifying the spi_workaround from off to on in armbianEnv.txt on the SD, but this prevent the kernel to boot from SD.

 

Any help would be appreciated... 

 

That script probably needs updating honestly.

@laibsch do you know if uboot relies on the dts node name being named sdhci? I'm working on an upstream commit that renames all marvell node names to mmc, as required by the binding.

I switched from microsd to USB booting with a flash drive. My god that is such a speedup.

Anyway, one issue I've noticed is if I have the flash drive plugged in, it boots fine. If I have the flash drive plugged in + an external USB hub, it fails to boot.

 

edit: solved with different hub.

Edited August 25Aug 25 by Mangix