I’m using one of these as my boot drive.
Then using a larger SD on a internal USB SD reader for my home folder.
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Are you using some expanshion adapter for extra usb ports Rex? Can you link me to the one you use.
This is the expansion board I’m using.
This is the most feature rich board available. Just be up for ordering soon.
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Thanks Rex i will grab one when avaliable.
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OHHHH So that is the reason! I was so scared that my recent mod damaged my 16+64 rpi 5 lmao
I think I need to update the firmware, but how can I do if I’m getting the black screen? I’m trying to use the Ubuntu 24.04 image.
What Ubuntu image are you using not all of them work with the CM5. Also if you have the CM5 lite try using the smallest SD card you can, as smaller ones seem to work better to get booted for the first time. Then change the EEPROM settings to be able to use any SD card as outlined here.
I was using your 24.04 image from Google Drive. Now I’m using the official image. I have a 32GB microSD. How can I know if it’s powered on? I keep plugged in a power charger (5v-3A), but I don’t know if everything is ok. I can see the green light in the power button and after I press the button for 2 seconds the light becomes a little stronger.
Ok, so if you have a dim light it’s not fully off. Since you haven’t changed the EEPROM yet. I’d remove the batteries just to make powering it off easier. You might have to change out a few SDs till you find one that works. It’s nice to have a HDMI to see when if it fails as you can’t see the bootloader on the internal screen. Once you do get it booted change the EEPROM so you can use a larger SD.
Ok. I will do that then. It maybe take some time since I need to get an mini-HDMI adapter, I don’t think I have one. I also will open again this weekend and remove the batteries so I can turn on/off better.
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You just need to find a sd that’ll work in the system as is so you can edit the eepeom. i have instructions in this thread and a sd card that is known to work.
I got the boot once before, with the same SD card, but it was Ubuntu, it did the initial configuration (add user, configure Wi-Fi, etc.) but rebooted. I completely forgot to try CTRL-ALT-F2 to update the firmware. But I will try another SD card that I have in an old and unused Rasberry Pi.
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The one in the Raspberry Pi is 64GB because the Raspberry wasn’t so old after all. What I did was getting the SD card from my Flipper Zero that has 16GB, but it’s really slow, even I’m writing the Trixe lite image to get a console as soon as possible. I will let you know what happened.
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The SD card with 16GB did the trick and booted. For some reason my password wasn’t being accepted during login. I probably messed up during initial configuration. I will try to use Ubuntu 24.04 instead, but it will take some time to write the SD card.
UPDATE: I checked and I already had a firmware from May/25. I enabled the beta access and got an update from Aug/25.
Now I’m going to try using a bigger SD card.
UPDATE 2: After the eeprom update I can see the bigger SD card appears as detected, which is good, but still doesn’t boot it.
I tried adding that config to existing config.txt file, and also replacing all the content by that configs. Didn’t work in both cases.
It says it can read the FAT partition (I can send a photo, if you want).
@Rex Do you have any other tips?
what did you add and what did you change in the config.txt? you don’t need to change anything in it at least for the stock setup. did you apply any custom setting when flashing like user or wifi?
sure post a picture of the error.
A added at a first try and replaced the content by the config in your post: EEPROM config and the CM5 lite
You can see in the top the SD card appears as detected, which didn’t happen in my previous photo.
I didn’t apply any special config. I’m an old-school folk and I used dd to write the image:
dd if=ClockworkPi-Ubuntu-24.04-6.12.45.img | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb
15967305+0 records inMiB/s] [ <=> ]
15967305+0 records out
8175260160 bytes (8.2 GB, 7.6 GiB) copied, 1322.9 s, 6.2 MB/s
7,61GiB 0:22:02 [5,89MiB/s] [ <=> ]
15967294+22 records in
15967305+0 records out
8175260160 bytes (8.2 GB, 7.6 GiB) copied, 1322.92 s, 6.2 MB/s
I used pv to get the status of writing and not lose my remaining sanity. 
are you saying you put the contents of that post in your config.txt? if so that won’t work you need the cm5 booted to edit the eeprom as it lives in the bootloader of the cm5.
also i don’t think that sd was flashed right as there should only be 2 partitions on the sd and the screenshot says "failed to open partition 4 & 5. reflash the image without decompressing it using rpi-imager without any custom settings.
On Linux I could mount the boot partition and change the file. What I’m doing now is putting some /dev/zero in the SD card to clean up the partition table and then I will rewrite the image.
I need to decompress first, or on-th-fly, so the image be recognized, since .xz is the format that compresses the file. But if doesn’t work I will recompress and try using the RPi Imager.
there is no file to change on the sd card. the eeprom lives on the cm5, like a bios. so you need to have the cm5 booted to change the settings. there is nothing in the config.txt that you need to change to run the image with a uconsole. reflash the image do not change anything in the config.txt. you need to get into the os then follow the instructions in that eeprom post to make the cm5 work with other sd cards.
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