Booting from sata drive

Support
1

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.

2

Lol, glad to find this. I have a similar problem, already running FB on a machine as a Live-usb and accesed portal via web from another point on the same network and created my account… i was looking for any “Button” to install FB on disk but any of them, also thinking in copy the the usb on disk as you said but nos sure how to…

3

I don’t own a Banana Pro (but a Raspbi4B), so take this with a pinch of salt.

I’ve found a forum post explaining how to get Banana Pro to boot from SATA here. If you can get that working, then I suggest you put the FBX Image for Banana Pro on your external drive and let it boot. The setup instructions on the FBX website should help you from there.

Cheers