How To Boot From NVME on RockPro64?

The RockPro64 has a built in BOOTROM, which checks for valid boot sectors on different devices. In the case of RockPro64 the BOOTROM checks the following:

  1. Uboot on SPI flash. If found continue booting, if not found go to step 2.
  2. Uboot on eMMC. If found continue booting, if not found go to step 3.
  3. Uboot on SD card. If found continue, if not found go to step 4.
  4. Boot systems on Ethernet. If not found stop booting.

So to be able to boot Manjaro from NVME, you need to have a Uboot that supports NVME (the Manjaro one does) on either SPI, eMMC or SD card. I have never used the SPI, so I will not count that.

You can flash our image to the NVME drive using DD, Etcher or our Manjaro ARM Flasher. But you also need to flash the 2 uboot binaries to the eMMC drive (idbloader.img and u-boot.itb), like described in the uboot flashing instructions here: uboot-rockpro64.install · master · manjaro-arm / packages / core / uboot-rockpro64 · GitLab.
After you do that, make sure that the PARTUUID’s are correct in /etc/fstab and /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf and it should boot to your NVME drive.

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