I’ve successfully installed DietPi on my R5S and it’s working great!
The problem comes when I try to boot a freshly flashed DietPi SD card on my R4SE. I put the SD card in, hold down the Mask button and power it on. After holding the Mask button for 5 seconds, I release it but I get no activity at all on any of the LEDs. The power LED is a solid orange but none of the other light up at all. I’ve checked my DHCP logs and I get no requests for an IP after powering it on. I’ve tried the same process with both the LAN and WAN ports.
I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong. If I flash openwrt onto the same SD card I can boot into it fine so I don’t think it’s a problem with the SD card or the R4SE.
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:
U-Boot TPL/SPL (i.e. upsream U-Boot, also called mainline U-Boot)
Rockchip MiniLoader
Things to note:
FriendlyELEC’s image uses Rockchip MiniLoader
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?!
Thanks for the reply! Given that I can boot into openwrt from the sd card using the Mask button, I feel like it should work the same for DietPi?
I did think about doing that but when I’m booted into openwrt, I can’t see the emmc device. I’ve also tried flashing the friendlywrt images to the SD card as well but it refuses to load those either. So far, only Openwrt has worked.
Maybe it’s worth giving armbian a shot and seeing if it sees the emmc. If it does I should be able to download the diet pi image and dd it to the emmc
It definitely has emmc as when I first powered it on with no SD card it loaded the preinstalled friendlywrt but I borked that by trying to put openwrt on it.
Just tried with armbian and that won’t boot either. Seems openwrt is the only thing I can boot! Maybe there’s something I can do to get it to see the emmc…
root@OpenWrt:~# lsblk -o name,fstype,label,size,ro,type,mountpoint,partuuid,uuid
NAME FSTYPE LABEL SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT PARTUUID UUID
mmcblk1 59.5G 0 disk
├─mmcblk1p1 ext4 kernel 40M 0 part 5452574f-01 84173db5-fa99-e35a-95c6-28613cc79ea9
└─mmcblk1p2 ext4 rootfs 1G 0 part / 5452574f-02 ff313567-e9f1-5a5d-9895-3ba130b4a864
I wish I could find another OS that actually boots on the thing so I can see if it’s just openwrt that doesn’t want to see it but all of them refuse to boot from the SD card.
So far I’ve tried DietPi, Armbian, FriendlyWRT, and OpenWRT but OpenWRT is the only one that loads. All the others just sit there with no activity on any of the LEDs, just a solid power LED.
I’ve bought a USB A-A cable so hopefully I can access it that way!
the only small issue find is the mismatch beetwen LAN and WAN led status (using or connecting LAN port activate WAN led. Using WAN port activate LAN led).
Thus can be configured on some led_status config files, but config don’t stay after reboot (need more investigation from my side)
