Rock64 eMMC Boot: Does this seem overly complex or is it just me?

Troubleshooting
1

I have a Rock64 with 2GB RAM running the latest version of DietPi on a high endurance SD card. It sits on my LAN and does nothing except run Cloudflared, but disk access is a bit slow for my liking. (Naturally. It’s an SD card.)

So I bought a 64 GB eMMC module from Pine 64.

In the past, on my Rock Pi 4B (Radxa), I simply flashed DietPi onto the eMMC, popped it on the board and booted up. Easy peasy.

The Rock64 requires that you connect two pins with a jumper in order to use the eMMC. No problem. I grabbed a jumper from my toolkit, attached the eMMC and powered up.

Nada.

During my troubleshooting, “Professor of the Pine” wrote 1,773 words on the subject!

His method includes connecting a serial console adapter, booting from an SD card, then flashing the eMMC - and more.

This seems ridiculously complex.

Has anyone successfully used eMMC on a Rock64 without the ritual and incantations that the Good Professor purports as “The Way?”

I found one post on the forum from 2017 but it wasn’t definitive.

2

This seems totally over done, I have the same as you rock64 with eMMC and did not do any of that. Did you get the little adapter microSD to eMMC?
https://ameridroid.com/products/emmc-adapter

I wonder what version of the rock64 you have? For some reason I don’t remember the jumper situation but then again it has been a while.

Also I had followed this guide for at least one of my rockchip boards.
https://dietpi.com/blog/?p=1236#special-partitioning

3

Yes, I have the microSD to eMMC adapter. DietPi was successfully flashed using Etcher.

I’m not sure what version of the board I have, but I purchased it in 2021. I know that’s not really helpful. I’d have to pull it out and check the version.

Oh that’s interesting. I didn’t even think of that. I’d have to attach the eMMC module to make sure the current DietPi install can see and mount it. If so, I may give that a try.

I’ll have to move Cloudflared to another machine temporarily, but that’s relatively easy to do.

Thanks!

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