How to completely get rid of the SD card and boot from external?

[lalo.garcia.g91]

Hello.

I’ve been struggling since a week ago on this… I’ve seen many videos and stuff but nothing seems to be clear.

I’m trying to get rid of the SD card completely, and use either NVMe, U-disk or a combination with eMMC. I don’t even want to have the SD card installed. Reason why is simple, sd cards are not too reliable since they can fail all of the sudden more often than other type of storage.

Can someone here help me out with a step by step on how to accomplish this? On the other hand, my host computer is a Windows.

Thanks alot!

[DaveYYY]

Get a Ubuntu PC first.
Windows is of no use here.

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/archives/r35.5.0/DeveloperGuide/IN/QuickStart.html
https://developer.nvidia.com/downloads/embedded/l4t/r35_release_v5.0/release/jetson_linux_r35.5.0_aarch64.tbz2
https://developer.nvidia.com/downloads/embedded/l4t/r35_release_v5.0/release/tegra_linux_sample-root-filesystem_r35.5.0_aarch64.tbz2

$ tar xf ${L4T_RELEASE_PACKAGE}
$ sudo tar xpf ${SAMPLE_FS_PACKAGE} -C Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs/
$ cd Linux_for_Tegra/
$ sudo ./apply_binaries.sh
$ sudo ./tools/l4t_flash_prerequisites.sh

sudo ./tools/kernel_flash/l4t_initrd_flash.sh --external-device nvme0n1p1
-c tools/kernel_flash/flash_l4t_external.xml -p “-c bootloader/t186ref/cfg/flash_l4t_t194_qspi_p3668.xml”
–showlogs --network usb0 jetson-xavier-nx-devkit internal

[lalo.garcia.g91]

Thanks Dave.

I never came up to the above info…

Does the second code command work on Xavier NX? The QuickStart says that command works on Jetson Orin Nano… And seems it won’t work for Xavier NX. As what I understand from the QuickStart is that Xavier can only boot from SD card?

Thanks for your time.

[DaveYYY]

@lalo.garcia.g91

Does the second code command work on Xavier NX? The QuickStart says that command works on Jetson Orin Nano… And seems it won’t work for Xavier NX.

Of course YES. Look at the command carefully and you can notice it’s different from the one for Orin Nano stated in Quick Start.

@lalo.garcia.g91

As what I understand from the QuickStart is that Xavier can only boot from SD card?

NO. Of course it can boot from NVMe.