I’ve read those but I have questions to nearly all of your messages. Let me ask them and you answer those that you find relevant to the problem. But maybe I’m just confused about what’s going on, sorry.
From other messages I understood that you are hit by the problem from this thread: Reform won’t finish booting but that is from October last year and that’s a bit more than a few weeks. What is Reform #200?
The big Reform will happily operate even when the cells are dead as long as the power cable is connected. So anything charge related should not be your problem. Especially since you can boot from a fresh sd-card just fine.
An SD-card with a vanilla factory image will not boot your system on NVMe by design. This is so that in case you make a mistake with your NVMe setup, you can still boot into a working rescue system instead of booting into a broken NVME installation. The SD-card image is supposed to give you a working system independent on any possible mis-configuration of your main system.
The use of disk labels was introduced in September 2023. This means that your other SD-card contains an image older than that?
What settings did you correct compared to the original SD image?
If your old system booted fine without those, then that’s not something you need. The partition labels were introduced to make it possible to use the same /etc/fstab independent on the underlying device which will number, for example, emmc devices differently.
Yes, what allows you booting from NVMe is the initramfs which needs to be configured to do so.
But as I understood your other messages, your problem is not a missing luks password prompt but your problem is that your screen stays black. Which one is it?
It would be useful to know when you last booted up your reform successfully.
If you updated it in August 2024, then your problem cannot be the one in this thread Reform won’t finish booting because that got fixed in October last year. Also, if you can successfully boot from a vanilla SD-card, then it will not be hard to restore things.
If it boots from sd-card, then this is very likely not power related.
This is very good and means we can fix this more easily.
This is what trips me up. The problem that was fixed with a boot.scr was resolved last year October. If you have not updated your Reform since then, then maybe it is that but I doubt it because your screen stays black and the problem there was that the LUKS passphrase prompt did not show up. The label of the boot partition has nothing to do with this either.
We can try out some things but first we need to figure out what the problem could be. It would be helpful to know when you last upgraded it.
Your problem with “screen stays black” sounds more like a bug in binutils which was found by IRC user pandora at around the end of June:
https://mntre.com/reform-irc-logs/2024-06-21.log.html#t09:22:03
Gory details here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1074111
Or reform community thread here: Sd boot img? (can no longer boot)
Could that be your issue? Does the time of the issue about fit with the last time you upgraded your system?
Also, do you happen to have a USB UART/serial adapter?