Hello, I have a NanoPi NeoCore (Allwinner H3 chipset) and I can boot the latest DietPi with Kernel 6.x from SD-card fine. It simply boots off the SD-Card on my NanoPi NeoCore and the darned Ethernet simply works; also the DTB overlay files work, so the additional I2C and UART hardware works in Dietpi.
However, the NanoPi Neocore is shipped by the hardware vendor with an outdated Armbian (using Kernel 4.x) on EMMC. What I now want is to replace the prepared EMMC Armbian distro with whatever is on my SD-Card, but this task is more difficult than I tought. What I would need is to simply copy the whole SD-Card to EMMC, but the recommended “dd if=‘sdcard…’ of=‘emmc…’…” command didn’t really help, because the bootloader “U-Boot” complained that the boot partition is now missing.
Obviously, the U-Boot demands that there is a Partition1 in FAT/exFAT/FAT32 which contains the boot directory, then there is supposed to be Partition2 with most of the Linux files, and why there is a Partition3 with the /var filesystem part etc., I dont know. But this is the preconfigured Armbian installation which was shipped by the vendor that way. However, what I need is just one single partition on EMMC which contains everything in one partition, preferably an EXT4 type partition.
Unfortunately, U-Boot always seem to use the command “fatload …” to load the rest of the stuff.
Is there any convenient way of getting rid of these 3 unwanted EMMC partitions and install DietPi instead, on one partition? If so, how do I tell U-Boot to boot from this one partition properly ? I heard that Armbian has a special tool for configuring the U-Boot and installing called “EFlasher”. Could we use this tool to get DietPi properly to EMMC and configure the U-Boot-loader properly and permanently ?
Any help greatly appreciated.