I have been banging my head against the desk over this. I can use u-boot on the SD card to boot alpine off a flash drive. I cannot get the entire thing running off SD card though. It keeps doing this. What am I missing?
Bad SD card.
SD cards aren’t meant to handle sustained read/write loads, and they wear out and die quickly on these devices. Start with a fresh card, and if you run a lot of services that generate a lot of log noise, set up log2ram to help extend the life of the SD card. A more permanent fix would be to boot from an SSD which won’t have these failure issues.
That’s why I’m running alpine. It runs in ram and only writes to the SD card when I run “lbu commit.”
As an experiment, I wrote u-boot to a different blank SD card and put the supposedly bad SD card with alpine on it into an USB card reader and connected that to the nanopi. Sure enough, the nanopi loaded u-boot on the sd card, then loaded alpine just fine off the USB card reader.
The card is fine. It just wont run alpine linux off the built in card reader.
Ah, so it’s the boot order and why it can’t mount the volume.
The wiki seems to suggest a process to boot reliably from SD card, but I’m seeing a lot of posts with the same issues. https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_R5C#Install_OS
I’m using the R4S, it’s a different model with a different SoC. I know there used to be a weird bug on this board regarding SD cards that was supposedly fixed in 2022 (https://kohlschuetter.github.io/blog/posts/2022/10/28/linux-nanopi-r4s/)
The other option here seems to be using uboot to boot your SD card: https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/usage/partitions.html
Since you know you can boot it via USB, you can just tell it to then boot from your SD Card instead of relying on the r4s to boot it. Docs say it’s possible to flash to the eMMC as well https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_R4S#eMMC_Boot
u-boot loads off the SD card because there is nowhere else to put it on this board. I want to put alpine there too. Alpine and u-boot can be on the same card but alpine wont finish loading unless it is being loaded from the USB port.