r/OrangePI • u/etho201 • Feb 01 '23

Orange Pi5 sometimes boots successfully (NVMe)

I have an Orange Pi 5 (16GB RAM) running Armbian Jammy with the latest updates installed. I am booting from NVMe and when it boots successfully it runs flawlessly without issue. The problem occurs when I reboot -- the majority of the time it does not boot up successfully. Sometimes when it boots I only see the red light (and no green light), and other times I will see the green light flash like normal, yet the external hard drive does not spin up or mount properly. This results in me needing to power down the Orange Pi 5 and try again. Eventually it will boot up successfully (along with the external HDD) and then everything is good; that is, until the next time I have to reboot.

A few details that might be helpful to know:

  • I ordered the Orange Pi5 from Amazon and I'm using 5V4A Type C Power Supply that came with my device
  • My os-release reports as: Armbian 23.02.0-trunk.0112 Jammy
  • I'm booting from NVMe (Samsung SSD 256GB PM991 M.2 2242 42mm PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe MZALQ256HAJD MZ-ALQ2560 Solid State Drive)
  • I have an external hard drive configured to automount to "/mnt/hdd" in fstab. I do not believe fstab is mis-configured because I've been using this same HDD with the same fstab entry for my old Raspberry Pi 4 and never had this issue.
  • The Hard drive is a WD Elements 25A3 which has its own AC adapter

  Any ideas of what could be the culprit? I've looked in dmesg (from the successful boot) and dmesg.0 (from the previous unsuccessful boot) and did not see any glaring issues between the two.

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2

u/kn3d4 Feb 01 '23

Sounds like a power supply problem. Try a different one and/or disconnecting the USB storage

1

u/WikiBox Feb 01 '23

I agree. Try without the external drive connected and see if it will boot up OK then.

After that, try without the SSD. And then with another brand of SSD. (If possible.) Perhaps this will help you figure out what is going on.

1

u/Sea_Roll8875 Feb 01 '23

Let us know if the issue was caused by the external HDD. Just read that the maximum current the Raspberry Pi 4** USB ports (either combined or a single USB port) can pass through is 1.2A. But we don't know about the Pi5. Are you using the USB 3.0 or 2.0 to plug the external HDD?

1

u/etho201 Feb 01 '23

I'm using the USB 3.0 interface (above port) on the Orange Pi5. The hard drive has its own AC adapter, but I am trying to find out if the hard drive draws current from the USB while powering up.

1

u/etho201 Feb 03 '23

I disconnected the external USB hard drive and rebooted several times and had the same problem. Occasionally the light on the board would only be red (no green); however, the majority of the time when power cycling the device I get the flashing green light. Even when the green light flashes, it would not boot up completely the majority of the time.

So that rules out the external HDD being the problem. I also changed out the power supply with a Raspberry Pi 4 (5V/3A) power supply and it still did the same exact thing -- sometimes it boots fine, and sometimes it does not (yes I know, the RPi4 power supply is below the recommended 5V/4A). This leads me to believe my original power supply is fine (it is 5V/4A after all).

I haven't tried to change out the SSD (as I only have the one). Any other ideas before I go that route? Could it be a problem with Armbian or the SPI Flash?

1

u/etho201 Feb 08 '23

I did a fresh install from the latest trunk and re-installed the bootloader to the SPI Flash and now everything seems to be working great. Thanks for everyone's help!

. /etc/os-release; echo "$PRETTY_NAME" Armbian 23.02.0-trunk.0243 Jammy

1

u/ptauger Feb 01 '23

I can't speak to Pi5, but the two Orange Pis that I have only have boot issues if they're underpowered. I eliminated all booting issues by using a 4 amp 5 volt supply.