Can you please post the output of sudo fdisk -l (a small L) and the output of sudo journalctl -b -g pcie after you booted into the SD-card?
Toshiba drive exactly the same. The SteamBox appears able to boot from it. My main laptop only has mSATA so I can’t see if that can boot from it.
Got hold of a Samsung 512Gb NVMe drive. This is seen by the board and it booted. Boot process a bit jarring, it just hung for a long time on the splash screen. Pressing Esc revealed for lines, 2 of which were complaining about I/O errors on the NVMe drive. I guessed it was resizing the partition, but really! Someone needs to address this apparently hang on boot issue. Anyhow, once up and running it’s extremely intermittent. One second at runs flat out, the next there’ll be a 20 second hang. Sometimes it boots super fast, and other it just hangs. Looking at the logs I can see repeated I/O errors on the disk, but running e2fsck at boot tells me the drive is just fine.
I’m going to load the drive in to an NVMe USB enclosure and run diagnostics on it, but sometimes this can be misleading as the diagnostics are just run against the enclosure, not the drive.
Looks like there were two issues. Just hooked the various drives up to a friend’s board. As before, non except the Samsung booted, but it behaves perfectly, no lags, pauses and no I/O errors. Put the old board back and the problems re-surface. So, for the Samsung it looks like a ribbon or board issue. I’m afraid I’m not going to start swapping things around again in case I break this board and ribbon.
@OS1 If you haven’t already, drop a note to support@pimoroni.com with a link to this thread so we can get you a new board/ribbon to try. You’ve suffered long enough and done more then enough testing! :-)
Done, many thanks. Got the new board and it works perfectly, but only with a Samsung SSD. There is still the issue that the Pi, and possibly the NVMe board, seem to have a very restrictive set of disks they’ll boot from. If memory serves this was an issue with previous Pis and USB booting. It’s a shame that Pi don’t do anything to address this. The Toshiba works fine as a boot device on the Pi 4 Compute module and the WaveShare IO Base, but the Pi 5 doesn’t even see it.