Booting from sata drive

I have been trying to boot FreedomBox on Banana Pro following direction from the manual. Here are the steps I used:

  1. I compiled mainline u-boot from git.
  2. I flashed the mainline u-boot both on sd card and sata drive.
  3. Note, I had already copied the original working sd card on Banana Pro to sata drive, so step 2 replaces the u-boot on sata drive to a freshly made u-boot from git.
  4. I leave sd card just with the u-boot in Banana Pro, and attach sata drive, and connect power. i can ping the BananaPro but then nothing happens. I can not ssh to my previously set up user account. After a while, I even loose the network connection, can not ping Banana Pro. so i power down by removing the power cable.

So how can I achieve this. Note that the sata drive does have 2 partiions, with a smaller empty first one, and root file system on second one.

Is there some way to achieve this. I do not have a serial console to interrupt the boot process, and hdmi cable does not show any prompt on monitor.

Any help to move FreedomBox to sata drive will be appreciated.