I have a Radxa Rock Pi 4B (an arm64 single-board computer) with a
(removable) eMMC module. I'd like to install Debian stable on it, and
would strongly prefer to use official Debian binaries and images.
I successfully booted debian-installer from eMMC after flashing the
rock-pi-4-rk3999 SD card image from [1] (using an eMMC-to-microSD
adapter and following the instructions in
README.concatenateable_images). However, I can't find much information
on how to use the installer on this board once it's started. The
Installation Manual [2] doesn't discuss the concatenateable images at
all and says only that non-UEFI boards might need certain unspecified
shell commands after install to make them bootable.
I tried installing to the eMMC module that the installer itself booted
from (using guided full-disk partitioning with LVM) with the hope that
this would at least preserve/re-use the copy of u-boot already there.
(IIRC this worked for me on other SBCs, but I may have been using a
different partitioning mode.) The install finished and I rebooted when
prompted, but I got nothing -- no response to pings and no HDMI output,
not even from u-boot. Same story after a hard power-cycle. I guess
u-boot got clobbered after all?
Anybody here know how these installers were meant to be used? Has this
been documented anywhere?
Thanks,
Daniel G.
[1]
https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/
[2] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/arm64/
