I downloaded the ARM64 verison of the XFCE Manjaro this morning and use both Rasberry PI Imager and balena-etcher to write the image to my USB-SSD.
Neither will boot. stuck in a loop on the bootloader looking for some firmware file that is missing.
My RPI4 has the latest eeprom image and will boot USB-SSDs with other os’s like RPI OS 32bit and Ubuntu Mate 64bit.
Am I missing a step? Questions in the forum seem to get answered that it’s a eeprom issue. Not my case.
That usually means you need to flash your eeprom. You evidently have not flashed it.
You can burn the image to a sdcard then boot up on the sdcard with the usb drive removed. You will have to go through the Setup first and let it reboot:
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a
sudo reboot
After rebooting clear out temp files in /boot and shutdown:
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -r
sudo shutdown -h now
Then take out the sdcard and plug in your usb drive and power up the pi4.
I do have my eeprom updated. I can boot Raspberry Pi OS straight from USB SSD as well as Ubuntu, and a few others.
If you are booting on all of the above mentioned and downloaded the xfce 20.2 image, and correctly burned the image to the same ssd then it should boot. We use the same kernel as the Pi OS with some extra modules enabled. At this point it sounds like the files on the boot partition may be corrupted or not burned correctly.
I have the 20.2 xfce image burned to my ssd and it is booting fine so I know the issue is not with the image.
what image burning software did you use? I tried Raspberry Imager 1.5
Found the problem. My image that I downloaded turned out to be the arm version and not the RPI4 arm version. I was looking for the 64bit version and that maybe what happened.
Is the RPI4 version 64 bit?
Yes it is.
Thanks for all your help. It’s booting now straight from USB-SATA SSD and I confirmed it’s 64 bit