Can I boot from USB external disk a TX2 NX card?

Hi to all in the forum. I’m newbie in Jetson environment. I have a Jetson mate box with 4 TX2 NX cards inside. I flash the image in the eMMC before but I saw that the filesystem has no big space.
I did not understand reading in the forum nor reading in the technical notes if it possible to boot the TX2 NX with an external USB.
I tried to flash an external USB disk (really is a NVME disk with a USB adapter) with the initrd mode but I think the card has to know which device has to boot. I have not understood if is it possible or not.
Can someone help me?

Some brief answers first

  1. TX2 series are not able to boot from usb drive. But it can mount root filesystem on usb drive. Which can also give you the extra space.

  2. Our tool is not able to flash files to external usb drive. Thus, to prepare the file system on usb drive, you need to put your usb drive to another host machine and copy rootfs to it.

  3. It will be better to dump uart log so that it would be easier to find out why some settings are not working.
    Jetson Nano Style - Serial Console - JetsonHacks

Thanks Wayne. I copied files inm USB disk through initrd procedure. The system is on USB disk but it does not boot. It boot from eMMC.
Can you show me the procedure to dump uart? I have a Jetson mate board. May I use the micro USB connected with Linux PC with mincom?

Sorry that we don’t know about Jetson Mate. If this is custom board, you should contact with the board vendor.

Wayne, I have downloaded the boot as you required. (It will be better to dump uart log so that it would be easier to find out why some settings are not working.) In any case all it works. but I would have more space for files.
Can you help me to mount root filesystem on usb drive, as you suggested in point 1 in order to have extra space?
boot_dump (31.3 KB)

Is there anyone who can help me to install rootfs in usb as Wayne proposed?

Hi,

Sorry for late reply.

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/l4t/index.html#page/Tegra%20Linux%20Driver%20Package%20Development%20Guide/flashing.html#wwpID0E0HO0HA

Please follow the “To set up a flash drive manually for using as root file system” in above document.

The “sda1” needs to change to your device node. For example, if your rootfs on the usb drive is seen as sdb1 on the jetson, then you need to use sdb1.

Also, you need to remove “quiet” in your /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf in your emmc so that the uart log will show full kernel log.

Thank you Wayne!! I’ll test and I’ll report here the results.

@WayneWWW Try to follow the procedure but I have the same problems described in the post " RootFs on external SD card not working / blank frozen Ubuntu screen after System Configuration"

  1. prepared the USB disk on host PC with the procedure (cd Linux_for_Tegra/
    $ sudo BOOTDEV=sda1 ./flash.sh --no-flash sda1
    $ sudo mkdir tmp_system
    $ sudo mount bootloader/system.img.raw ./tmp_system
    $ sudo rsync -axHAWX --numeric-ids --info=progress2 --exclude=/proc ./tmp_system/ /mnt)

  2. boot Jetson with eMMc

  3. Plug the USB disk on Jetson

  4. Jetson in recovery mode

  5. connected with miniusb

  6. run on host PC sudo ./flash.sh jetson-xavier-nx-devkit-tx2-nx sda1

  7. reboot

  8. start the config procedure but it stops after system ask the APP partition dimension (as in the post I said above)

Where I’m wrong?

Hi,

If you don’t modify the APP part dimension, will it pass?

No, it shows the max dimension of the usb disk (1T) but the configuration stops. See the post I’ve shown before " RootFs on external SD card not working / blank frozen Ubuntu screen after System Configuration"

You can share your own log.

Solved. But I had to change USB disk. Now I have a USB key with 500G capacity (not a USB disk)
I’ll investigate more to understand why USB disk did not work.

@WayneWWW Solved also for the usb disk. Now it works. The problem was the bad initial partitioning of the disk. Solved this, all done.
All my best regards

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