@thagrol
Thank you, your answer was helpful and pointed me into the right direction over the past few days.
@memjr
After resolving booting order, i have performed same order of steps with nothing to show for it.
I am still unsuccessful at booting from NVMe.
Over the last two days i have tried several different approaches and came to the conclusion that there is a sever flaw in this concept and it needs further polishing.
First of all, either PI is not able to power the NVMe or the base is not able to properly utilize resources from PI.
My bet would be on power. AIUI the PCIe part of the NVMe base is a passive device - no processing of the signals is done they're passed straight through to the M.2 connector.
According to the data sheet teh maximum power available to PCIe devices vai the ribbon connector is 5W (1A @ 5V). If you drives needs more than that you will hit the problems you're seeing. Especially if you have other power hungry devices connected to the Pi and it you aren't using the official Pi 5 PSU.
Several times my PI experienced power starvation, i had to unplug the fan for it to become responsive again. It was always around NVMe relates tasks, such as detecting it after the boot or messing with partitions in gparted.
Again, this points to power issues.
Second, i don' think that base currently is capable to properly read/write from storage. After several cycles of writing images and deleting partitions, i had to use sfdisk tools to clear the drive by writing bogus data to it it get rid of traces of the old partitions, gparted and imager on PI were not capable of recognizing what was on the drive and to do anything about it. Eventually the imager on PI lost ability to utilize entire free space on drive, i ended up plugging it into the laptop and installing windows on it and then using disk repair tool.
Again, don't blame the base. There may be an incompatibility with the Pi 5's PCIe controller. Especially if you have configured things to run at gen 3 speeds (which it is not certified for).
Furthest i have gotten was past the Raspberry boot logo, after that a communication error with device happens and drops me into initramfs shell. Experience is the same across 2x RP5, power supplies and NVMe bases that i have.
What might work is writing to M2 from another device, like usb-nvme enclosure or a desktop, both of which i don't have at the moment.
I suggest you try the following:
- Contact Pimoroni for further support
- Check the power requirements of your NVMe drive.
- Tell us what PSU(s) you are using
- Tell us make and model of the NVMe drive you're using.
- Consider purchasing a USB-NVMe enclosure but be aware that you may still hit power problems (max current is a shared 8W and that assumes you have a 5V/5A PD PSU).
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Sat Mar 02, 2024 2:50 pm