April 22Apr 22 Hey Installed Armbian (Ubuntu-noble) with XFCE desktop on an HDD(sda) from SD-card, so I need to have an SD-card in my orange pi zero 2w. I wonder if I can move /boot to an another smaller SD-card? Or do I also need an "mbr" or someting also there u-boot are? /Cheers
April 22Apr 22 I assume OPi02w has no on-board storage, so it only is the bootcode in ROM, and that reads U-Boot binary blob from fixed sector offset location on the SD-card. It does not even need a MBR-table or GPT and it is not in a partition, so you won't see it. Only if you use dd to read (or write/wipe) that data you will know. See how U-Boot needs to be written for your OPi02w, then you will understand. If the U-Boot is build to initialize the USB and HDD, you do not need /boot partition on the SD-card. But I do not know that. Not all USB-SATA chipset drivers are in U-Boot, so if not, you indeed need a boot partition on de SD-card where kernel initrd DTB are, those should understand USB-SATA chips and so see the rootfs on HDD.
April 22Apr 22 Author Ok. Thanks. dd copie the blob. It has SPI or a little memory, but as I understand it could be a problem, so it easier to use SD as boot-disk.
April 22Apr 22 What you prefer or think is best. An extra boot partition is more flexible as it is an extra 'boot-stage' sort of, and normal computers that use UEFI anyway need also a FAT formatted bootpartition besides 1 or more rootfs for (multiple) OS. So not a bad approach to have separate boot partition an if on SD-card, is removable, so is flexible in case of trouble and/or testing things.
April 23Apr 23 The orange pi zero 2w is configured to only start u-boot from the microSD in the built-in microSD. You would have to: * recompile that uboot to load the initramfs and the kernel from your alternative storage (did you really mean HDD? which connector would you use?) or * load initramfs and kernel from the typical microsd /boot partition, but configure the kernel argument line to accept the HDD as the rootfs (make sure that the initramfs contains the kernel modules, and the hdd name is in the /etc/fstab file) or https://jamesachambers.com/orange-pi-zero-2-usb-ssd-boot-guide/ Edited April 23Apr 23 by robertoj
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