Booting Orange Pi 3 from eMMC

Date published: 6-Aug-2023

1 min read / 307 words

Author: R.G.

Orange Pi

Single Board Computer

In this post I'll show you how I went about flashing an Orange Pi 3 and booting from onboard eMMC storage.

Note this also worked for my Orange Pi Zero 2 albeit it was much simpler because it doesn't have all the eMMC steps.

Download the image for your orange pi model: https://www.armbian.com/orangepi3-lts/
1. I used armbian because I heard it has the best support for orange pi
Flash it:
1. On mac I used: https://etcher.balena.io/
2. Tried raspberry pi imager and kept getting an error about not having a “FAT” file system even though I made sure the SD was formatted as FAT
Plug it in to orange pi and also connect ethernet
Find orange pi ip
SSH into it:
1. ssh [email protected]
  1. Password was 1234 though user/pass could change depending on the image you download
  2. If you get an error like “too many failed authentications”, try this:
```
ssh -o IdentitiesOnly=yes root@192.168.x.x
```
2. On mac I prefer using VSCode ssh via Microsoft’s “Remote - SSH” plugin. However, I had to use ssh from the plain terminal for armbian to walk me through the welcome setup. On vscode, to setup ssh, simply use the ssh plugin and add the host:
Run through all the setup prompts to create user & so forth
sudo apt update and sudo apt full-upgrade
armbian-install Run the armbian script to boot from emmc instead of sd card
sudo shutdown -h now
Pull the SD and reformat it so it doesn’t boot from the image on it and free up space.
Insert SD and power on. System should still boot.

Mount the SD on boot:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak back up auto mount config
fdisk -l identify the partition you want to mount
sudo blkid /dev/mmcblk0p2 get the info from the partition

sudo nano /etc/fstab add info from blkid as new line item:

# my sd card is third one down:
# <file system>                                 <mount point>   <type>  <options>                                                       <dump>  <pass>
tmpfs                                           /tmp            tmpfs   defaults,nosuid                                                 0       0
UUID=f26d9dc6-60b0-451b-b4ef-28a743705cex       /               ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=600,errors=remount-ro,x-gvfs-hide       0       1
UUID=647D-3E34                                  /home/ao0/dev   exfat   defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=022                            0       0

sudo mount -a
df -h to check that it was mounted
touch ~/dev/hello.txt create a new file in the folder you mounted
reboot and see if that file is still there

Booting Orange Pi 3 from eMMC

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