I bought a Purple Hyper Pocket Reform from Crowdsupply over a year ago, and recently received my RK3588 upgrade and installed that.
When I booted after completing the upgrade, my 1TB SSD which came in the Hyper Pocket didn’t show up, and I booted from the flash on the RK3588 upgrade, it seems.
Where do I look to determine why my SSD isn’t mounting, and what do I need to do to start booting from it again. Can the same system that was on there (with the original iMX8MP+ processor card) boot the RK3588, or should I have updated something before performing the upgrade?
I believe I still have the original mainboard and display. The battery-charger board got upgraded as part of a warranty service by MNT, and I’ve got the Intel WiFi card installed and working.
Did you have a setup with encrypted SSD before you upgraded to rk3588? If yes, then the problem is that your /boot partition was on your old SoM and is now gone. That partition was responsible for booting your system on your SSD. Now that you swapped in RK3588, its emmc flash has a different /boot partiton which knows nothing about your SSD. So what you want to do is to boot from a SD card and then set up the new emmc from the rk3588 such that it boots your system from SSD again. You can run the tool reform-emmc-bootstrap to achieve that.
I had the Hyper Purple Pocket, as sold by CrowdSupply. The main differentiator for it was the 1TB NVMe SSD.
Other than that, I got a v2 battery board, and then later replaced the stock batteries with some larger capacity ones mentioned here.
I also ran “apt full-upgrade” periodically, but never moved the OS forward to the next major release.
I then added the big RK3588 upgrade (I got the version with the 32G or RAM and the 256G eMMC drive). I used the Intel WiFi card, once I got antennas with the correct connectors for that.
So as RK3588 Pockets go, mine is fairly stock, but not as much as a completely new one would be.
If you have never touched your OS installation since you bought the Pocket from crowd supply, could it be that your whole installation is actually on your eMMC? How did you use your SSD usually in your old setup? How do you conclude that your SSD “doesn’t show up”? You also say that you want to start booting from it again but that sounds like you have at some point moved your installation to the SSD but then you said in a later post that your SSD isn’t encrypted. Did you move your installation by manually partitioning it and then calling reform-migrate? Or did you run reform-setup-encrypted-disk? What you write still doesn’t perfectly fit together so I’m trying to find out what your configuration actually looked like. Where was your rootfs? How did you mount your SSD? Where was your /boot? Did you have to have an SD-card inserted to boot your unit? More details please.
Yes, it’s possible the entire installation was on the eMMC. I didn’t move the boot or migrate it from how the machine came, and I assumed I was booting off the SSD, but I may well have been using the eMMC.
As for other questions, I worked entirely in ~ or by installing things with apt. As I planned to eventually run OpenBSD on this machine, I didn’t poke at much within Linux, or tweak anything using the reform tools. I simply wanted to make sure the machine worked for me before ordering the RK3588, and then mostly leaving it sit until that arrived.
I do not remember ever putting an SD card in the Pocket, either, let alone intentionally booting from one, unless one came in it from CrowdSupply.
So yeah, it’s possible I was never using the SSD. I’m definitely not now, as the RK3588 sure seems to be booting from the eMMC on that processor card.
I finally got a chance to play with the actual Pocket a bit just now.
The SSD shows up as nvme0n1 in lsblk, but is not mounted.
mmcblk0p1 has the /boot mount point, and mmcblk0p2 has /
Note that I’m MUCH more familiar with BSDs than with Linux, and my familiarity with Linux all predates systemd and all the… changes that came with that.
At the moment, I’m just trying to get the Pocket back to where I was before the upgrade, as now it’s doing things like dimming the screen after maybe a minute idle, and “man” is now getting paged by something other than /bin/more, so when I quit after looking at a manpage, it goes away, rather than leaving the last bit on my terminal so I can see what I just read. For that matter, I’m being extra-clunky, as my shell got switched away from tcsh…
OK. Apparently I never was using the SSD, and all of my changes were on the emmc on the iMX8MP processor card. Bother.
reform-boot-config --emmc ssd
reports
I: Using partition on eMMC for /boot: /dev/mmcblk0p1. W: First partition on SSD (/dev/nvme0n1p1) does not exist. E: Your SSD at /dev/nvme0n1 does not seem to be a LUKS device
So apparently I need to partition and format the SSD. I don’t have any particularly strong need for an encrypted drive, since everything this machine can access is via unique ssh keys and I can disable those should I lose the physical machine. But if having an encrypted SSD is the path of least resistance, I can go that way, too.
Thanks to those who helped. At least I can now see that my SSD is still there, and I was never using it in the past.
