To boot BredOS from an NVMe SSD on the Rock 5B or Rock 5B Plus, you'll need to follow a few steps to prepare your device.
These instructions assume your Rock 5B/5B Plus is already booted into Linux (either from an eMMC or microSD card) and has network connectivity. If you're offline, copy the necessary files to external media like a USB stick to access them.
First, make sure you have the latest UEFI firmware installed. You can easily install the required package from the BredOS repository.
For the Rock 5B Plus, use the following command:
sudo pacman -Sy rock-5b-uefi
For the Rock 5B, use this:
sudo pacman -Sy rock-5bplus-uefi
Next, you'll need to flash the UEFI firmware to your device's SPI memory.
For the Rock 5B Plus, use the following command:
sudo dd if=/usr/share/edk2/rock-5bplus/rock-5bplus_UEFI_Release_latest.img of=/dev/mtdblock0 bs=512 skip=64 seek=64 conv=notrunc
For the Rock 5B, use this:
sudo dd if=/usr/share/edk2/rock-5b/rock-5b_UEFI_Release_latest.img of=/dev/mtdblock0 bs=512 skip=64 seek=64 conv=notrunc
Once the UEFI is flashed, you'll need to download the latest BredOS image from the Images repository. Extract the image file and then use the dd command to write the image to your NVMe SSD.
Make sure you replace /dev/nvme0n1 with the correct path to your NVMe drive.
sudo dd if=/path/to/bredos_image.img of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4M status=progress
🎉 Once the process is complete, reboot your Rock 5B/5B Plus and it should boot from the NVMe SSD!
Do not keep the SDcard or EMMC connected when booting from NVMe as it will make it so your device wont boot!!