Hi Tim,
I tried using the arm-image-installer to create a bootable sd card for my rockpro 64 using the fedora 40 minimal image 40-1.14.
It completed ok but did not boot, dumped me into a uboot environment. When I put the card in a different machine to look at the partitions the first one would not mount with an error of “doesn’t seem to have a valid NTFS”. So I created an valid file system with mkdosfs, mounted it and copied the appropriate efi files to it.
Tried to boot again and got absolutely nothing. As if the uboot was not there. So I put the car back into the other machine and did a update-uboot with the proper uboot file.
Tried to boot and got the same thing as the original attempt to boot. Put the card back into the other machine and the first partition would not mount again same issue with not a valid NTFS.
It seems to me that the writing the uboot is stepping on the first partition.
We leave 8Mb on the the minimal image, the Rockpro64 image must have grown above this, will need to take a look.
You could just put the firmware on the SPI flash on that device and then it's out of the way.
The other way, a little bit more involved is to write the image with --target=none then shrink the first partition a little, then use update-uboot to write the FW out.
I tried the workstation image and it did not have this problem.
Which is strange because the Workstation image has 1Mb, it could just be writing it to the middle of the partition and by some chance missing things like grub.
Does it make any sense that when the arm-image-installer writes the uboot for the rockpro64 that it could be stepping on the first partition that it has previously written?
Yes, if the FW is too big it could do that.
Peter