Difficulty to get into Armbian flash mode about armbian-images

[dsigurds]

After the 25 second press you release the button. The 25 second press will work for any duration over 20 seconds. The 6 second press in reality is between 5-10 seconds. So, no it doesn't need to be precise. You don't need to wait. After the 25 second press remove the power cable, press and hold the button, and then plug back in power with the button pressed. The important thing is that the button must be pressed and held while you insert the power cable.

[krioso]

Thanks so much for the quick reply. After the 25+ second event, and after immediately unplugging the power, doing the 5-10 second event (holding the button and then plugging the power cable back in) - should the power light then be on after the second event? My unit appears to be turned off as far as the power light is concerned. the lsusb command does not show the additional USB device either.

[krioso]

In case it matters - this is a Helm V2a.

[krioso]

Still having issues....maybe a short YouTube video could be posted to demo it?

At the moment, I cannot get the unit powered on back to standard Helm operation. Will let it sit for a while unplugged, that has worked so far to get it back to normal mode. No indication of any success in getting to flash-ready mode.

[dsigurds]

I'll post a video when I get the chance. Just for clarification, the button must be held down before you apply power and then must remain held down for 6 seconds after the power is applied. After the 6 seconds release the button and that should put it into maskrom mode.

[krioso]

Here are the exact steps I followed:

• Attach power cable and Ethernet to the Helm.
• Wait for the Helm to register as Online in the Helm app.
• Hold the button for 25 seconds.
• Release the button
• Pull the power cable out
• Hold the power button in while I re-attach the power cable
• Continue to hold the power button in for 6 seconds (also tried 5-10 seconds), from when the power cable is attached
• Attach the USB cable from my Linux host to one of the USB-C ports to the right of the Ethernet port on the Helm when looking at it from the rear
• I observe that the Helm power light is not on at this point
• No new USB device shows up on the Linux host when I issue the lsusb command on the Linux host.

Then I have difficulty getting it to power back on in standard mode. I usually let the unit sit disconnected from power and network for some hours and then plug in Ethernet and power. I did this overnight on my most recent attempt and at this moment the Helm is online in normal mode and the Helm app shows that the Helm is online.

I checked the Linux host for USB "reception" by attaching and detaching other devices to the USB port and they appear and disappear from the lsusb list. So the Linux host will register a new USB device once attached.

My earlier question also remains: should the Helm power light be on after executing the 6 second event?

Thanks again.

[krioso]

I am trying it again today. I just did the 25 second press (I held it for 30), released the power button, unplugged the power cable, held the button in, plugged the power cable in and held the button for 9 seconds.The good news is that the power light is on even after the second 6+ (9) second event. So far though, no sign of recognizing the USB on the linux host. WIll keep playing with it.

[krioso]

The power light remained on because the Helm is still registering as Online. I tried again, this time I pulled the power cable while I was still holding in the button for the 25+ second event - then I did the 6-second event. The power light is off but the Rockchip USB device is now showing on the lsusb list on the Linux host.

It seems as thought pulling the power cable for the first 25+ second event and continuing to hold the putton in while removing the power cable may have been the trick. Now to see if I can successfully flash the Armbian image. with rkdeveloptool.

[krioso]

Flashing went well without any issues. Got a notification from my router that a new network device has joined the network ("helm-v2a"). Now on to the "setting up Armbian for ssh" steps.

In the instructions I prefaced the rkdeveloptool execution with ./ as follows to avoid "command not found":

$ sudo ./rkdeveloptool db helm-loader-build-38.bin
$ sudo ./rkdeveloptool wl 0 [the .img file downloaded from here]
$ sudo ./rkdeveloptool ul helm-loader-build-38.bin
$ sudo ./rkdeveloptool rd

[krioso]

All systems go - ssh'd into the new server, now prepping nvme0n1 drive for general use.

[dsigurds]

Thanks for your persistence and I'm happy that you got it up and running.

[krioso]

Suggest updating instructions to explicitly state that power button should not be released until after the power cable is pulled on the 25 second event.

Also - add the ./ to the rkdeveloptool commands (sudo ./rkdeveloptool ...)

Thanks for making this Armbian option available given the circumstances.

[git529]

The power light remained on because the Helm is still registering as Online. I tried again, this time I pulled the power cable while I was still holding in the button for the 25+ second event - then I did the 6-second event. The power light is off but the Rockchip USB device is now showing on the lsusb list on the Linux host.

It seems as thought pulling the power cable for the first 25+ second event and continuing to hold the putton in while removing the power cable may have been the trick. Now to see if I can successfully flash the Armbian image. with rkdeveloptool.

Hi. Can you list the steps necessary to format/mount the nvme drive?

[l3nticular]

@git529 you can follow these steps:
https://reddit.com/r/HelmServerMods/comments/10pfcdf/setting_up_ssd/

[git529]

@git529 you can follow these steps: https://reddit.com/r/HelmServerMods/comments/10pfcdf/setting_up_ssd/

Thank you! I followed the steps and I have now permanently mounted the 1TB ssd in /mnt/helm-data and I can see it doing 'df -H'

However, I was hoping to do a normal install where everything is installed on the ssd drive so that the standard folders (/etc /home /media /opt /var) are automatically using the ssd space. Is that possible? How could that be achieved?

[l3nticular]

At this point, you’re now asking standard Linux questions so there are many resources.

The short answer is that I don’t know exactly. If you just want to move those directories, it should be not too bad. It might be as simple as creating new virtual volumes, mounting them t a temporal location, copying the existing files, then setting them to the desired mount locations in fatal and rebooting.

If you want to move the whole root partition, then you’d need the boot partition to support LVM, which I’ve done on raspberry pi but I think that has a different bootloader.

My personal opinion is that I really just want a few brand new volumes (docker, data, etc.) and don’t need the base OS to be on LVM, so I didn’t bother. You could also just put individual users’ home directories each on their logical volumes.

[l3nticular]

One similar option if you’re looking to move the root:

https://forum.radxa.com/t/configured-armbian-move-to-nvme/2585/9

boot from eMMC, root from NVME.
To do this, create the root partition on your NVME drive, using gparted for example.

After that run the following command from Armbian:
sudo armbian-config

and choose option to move / install to NVME partition.

You might not want to use LVM with this option though (I’m not sure if the bootloader or the eMMC boot partition supports it). But I love LVM for backups since you can snapshot and then transfer the snapshots.