I have tried to use the nand-sata-install to allow me to boot the roots from an external USB HDD. It goes through the process but after rebooting, the "loading kernel" message appears and then nothing - I have tried this a few times and even used the latest version of the script on GitHub.

 

Any ideas on how to make this work - I have a external USB HDD (500mB).

Can you provide a boot log and boot script /boot/boot.cmd to see what went wrong?

as a noob - I don't know how to do this since it does not come up after than changes....must I insert SD into another system and where would I find them ?

Original boot.cmd:

setenv bootargs "console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootwait rootfstype=ext4 cgroup-enable=memory swapaccount=1 sunxi_ve_mem_reserve=0 sunxi_g2d_mem_reserve=0 sunxi_no_mali_mem_reserve sunxi_fb_mem_reserve=16 hdmi.audio=EDID:0 disp.screen0_output_mode=1920x1080p60 panic=10 consoleblank=0 enforcing=0 loglevel=1"

after nand-sata-install - (before reboot)

root@bananapim2:/boot# cat boot.cmd
setenv bootargs "console=tty1 root=/dev/sda1 rootwait rootfstype=ext4 cgroup-enable=memory swapaccount=1 sunxi_ve_mem_reserve=0 sunxi_g2d_mem_reserve=0 sunxi_no_mali_mem_reserve sunxi_fb_mem_reserve=16 hdmi.audio=EDID:0 disp.screen0_output_mode=1920x1080p60 panic=10 consoleblank=0 enforcing=0 loglevel=1"

After reboot red light goes off, display clears, UDB HDD led comes on and then nothing else shows on display.

Try mounting boot partition on SD card and rest on HDD.

 

You can trace boot log, using cheap USB to UART dongle and couple of wires.

http://linux-sunxi.org/UART