I’ve been trying to add a 2 TB SSD to my Pocket Reform and it’s been a challenge. More on that later…
Have you installed a SSD to your Pocket? What was your process? Boot from USB, SD? Did you use the install wizard on your NVME? Or did you use a byte copy? Command line or UI? Be specific please.
It’s tricky to get U-Boot to boot from USB or SD, but I finally had luck with the latter, then I did a byte copy from SD > NVME and retired for the evening. Today I woke up to a completely unresponsive device - no power. Ugh. Anyway, that’s also for my (eventual) post on installing a NVME blade in the Pocket.
I’d love to hear from anyone that’s installed an NVME drive in Pocket. (Don’t most Pockets owners buy an NVME just for the speed?) If you did, how did you set it up?
I use one for projects and media but I left the OS on the eMMC. It works well enough and this maximizes available storage. I may change to a dual boot setup once I get NixOS running, but so far I’ve only built the install image, I haven’t had time to adapt my desktop config yet.
That probably doesn’t help for your intended use case. It is possible that doing a byte copy resulted in duplicate partition UUIDs. I think this could cause issues when both drives are present. If you can’t boot, you could change the UUIDs on the NVMe on a different machine (use an adapter if needed), will need to mess with fdisk to fix the UUIDs (I don’t remember the specifics).
I have a WD Blue 1 TB NVMe in my Pocket, and I set it up from a working eMMC system using the reform-tools for setting up encrypted NVMe.
It doesn’t always enumerate correctly on power up and so sometimes it takes me a boot or two to get running, but once running, it’s fully stable. I had an SK Hynix Gold P31 that would freeze the entire system under load.
Same here. I have a WD Blue 1 TB, I usually boot from an sd-card with the latest system image and then run reform-setup-encrypted-disk to set up both SSD and eMMC. The former for the rootfs and swap and the latter with /boot.
Did you have a look at serial output during unsuccessful boots? There is the issue that sometimes eMMC doesn’t init correctly but that happens before the initramfs gets read from /boot on it.
Please open another topic with the problems you encountered so that we can fix them.
That’s what reform-flash-rescue does when it copies the image from SD-card to eMMC:
tune2fs "/dev/${DEV_MMC}p1" -U random
Replace ${DEV_MMC} with mmcblk0 or mmcblk1 depending on your platform.
That does happen to me every so often, but the most common failure is that the kernel and initramfs load, but then the boot process hangs waiting for the NVMe to come online so that cryptsetup can unlock it.