NVMe Base Duo + 500GB (2x250GB) SSD won't boot

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1

I cannot get the Raspberry pi 5to boot from NVMe, I set NVMe first for boot but it seems to give up quickly and go on to USB and SD… without USB or SD present

I booted from an SD updated, updated firmware, installed the recommended Pi OS 64 bit on the NVMe with no errors, chose to boot from NVMe first in the Raspberry pi app… I then tried installing the OS on both drives… I then removed the SD card and nothing makes it boot the NVMe.

I also can’t figure out how to mount the drives booted from SD or USB thumb drive… they appear with lsblk but I can’t figure out how to mount them.

I’ve read that the Pi doesn’t like to boot from “behind a PCI bridge” which I’m assuming is what is happening but I also see people sucessfully booting from the duo?

The drives came with the nvme board so I assume they are compatable…

Someone had a hack where they booted from a USB partition but then configured that to load the OS from a NVMe, but I can’t mount the drive to get it’s ID to put in the config file…

I did not overclock the pci bus… to level 3 or whatever

2

Ok I’m super dumb, it says right on the product page that the Raspberry Pi 5 doesn’t support booting from a dual NVMe card :( How did I miss that.

3

Been there done that on a couple of occasions. ;) It happens.
I do believe its because of the PCIe Gen2 Packet Switcher. The current Pi 5 Firmware isn’t able to boot from it.

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4

What did I miss for actually mounting the drives? I can see them in lsblk… but they don’t show up in /mnt or /media

5

That I don’t know? I have the Base, not the DUO. And my Linux skills are very basic. :(

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6

Sounds like you’d need to add them to /etc/fstab - from vague memory I think the default one has some notes explaining the various settings (don’t think any of my Pi are in a state for me to look right now!)

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7

I did some digging and I got them mounted… but now I need a use case for fast external storage… I’m used to big external USB drives being

Anybody have some tips?

I saw one person editing the boot partition from a USB to pointing at one of the NVMe drives… but needed to find the /fstab code for the drive to put into the boot file…

I wonder why a USB drive and editing the boot partition on the SD Card?

8

I don’t know if it still applies to the PI 5, but I seem to recall it was possible to put some form of minimal “boot” on a microSD that then loads the OS from another drive. I think it worked for the PI 3 anyway. At the time I just wanted to boot from a USB drive because I’d already worn out a microSD card.

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9

Dual NVME Boards supports NVMe boot with the latest eeprom (2024/05/17 version).

read on aliexpress, not tested yet

10

It’s been posted on twitter too.
Peter Onion on X: “That’s a @Pimoroni NVMe BASE DUO fitted with two 500Gb NVMe SSDs. With the latest firmware installed on an Pi5 it can now boot PiOS from an NVMe SSD on this board. The net-install of PiOS just works, it’s almost too easy :-) https://t.co/rKltuxWtb8” / X (twitter.com)