Can't boot DietPi on the NanoPi R4SE

General Discussion
2

There was an similiar issue here, but OP stopped answering.

I digged a bit in the NanoPi wiki and came across this:

4.5 The Boot order between eMMC and SD card

By default, the system will be booted from the TF card first, but this is not the case under all conditions. This section will explain all situations in detail;

Refer to rockchip official document [1], there are two types of loader program:

  1. U-Boot TPL/SPL (i.e. upsream U-Boot, also called mainline U-Boot)
  2. Rockchip MiniLoader

Things to note:

  1. FriendlyELEC’s image uses Rockchip MiniLoader
  2. The third-party image usually uses U-Boot TPL/SPL

The following situations will always start from eMMC:
If the system in the eMMC, or the system in the TF card uses the first Loader type U-Boot TPL/SPL, it will always boot from the eMMC;

And if I’m not wrong, our images also use u-boot, which means the device is trying to boot from eMMC instead of the SD card. There is also a nice table in the wiki which summerizes the different combinations of boot priority.
To fix this issue they indicate to run

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=8M count=1

which means you would need to to

  • boot first from SD card with a working OS, like FriendlyWRT, and then
  • run the above dd command
  • shutdown the device and flash DietPi onto the card

Then it should boot from the SD card with the u-boot bootloader?!