@LDighera : Thanks, Larry! This is awesome. I assume it should work on any Linux where dd is installed? Will it work if run from the boot drive, on the boot drive? I know Linux puts locks on certain files, but those are system level and shouldn’t stop user files from being backed up, right?
@NullOrEmpty , I went through this a couple times getting started; the VIM4 is advanced enough over something like a Pi that there’s a bit of a learning curve.
Have you updated the VIM4’s software? This is a different process than flashing the eMMC, and the closest thing I can analogize it to is flashing the BIOS or firmware. I assume that’s what it’s doing? Since everything is still in beta, there aren’t changelogs, but I’m pretty sure hardware support bugfixes can rely on getting the latest firmware.
When you get into OOWOW, it’ll offer to let you flash the eMMC. Cancel out of that and you’ll get a menu with more options. One of them is a software update. I’m guessing you’ll have one available.
@SinisterPisces dd is available on all *nix systems. It is a low-level bit copier, and knows nothing of files.
My little script will copy live/mounted drives, and as such, the data is changing, so there is possibility for issues. But, it works for me.
Right now I haven’t. I had a few of these at hand, and they work with mainline kernels well, on VIM3 with MX2 and other mainline SBCs, mostly Armbian/Ubuntu Jammy.
That’s good to know - I’m not alone. I fixed similar PCIe / NVMe issues on 2014 MacBooks with Ubuntu. There were bits set incorrectly in the /sys/ hierarchy.
There still seems to be issues with the NVME drives I have on my VIM4 under the latest khadas release of Ubuntu -22.04-gnome. I’ve tried a Samsung Evo 970 Plus and a Netac N930E Plus, both of which work fine on other devices but have corruption when reading from them on the VIM4. I should also add that it doesn’t make any difference whether they are plugged into the board or a USB3 caddy.
I’ve got a Netac NVMe drive in a USB3 caddy. The drive is formatted as NTFS and works perfectly in every device I’ve used it on except the VIM4.
On the previous release, the drive would sometimes get picked up but would hang when trying to write anthing to it and sometimes it wouldn’t even show up. It didn’t matter whether it was plugged into the board or the USB in the caddy and it didn’t matter whether it was formatted with ext4 or NTFS - it was completely unusable.
After upgrading to the latest version, the drive seemed to be working fine but last month, I saved all the footage from my dashcam onto the drive using my Windows 11 notebook while we were on holiday. When I got home, I plugged the drive into the VIM4 and copied the files onto my NAS. When I played the files on my desktop computer they were jumping and skipping.
I plugged the drive into my desktop and they played perfectly so I plugged the drive into my QNAP NAS and re-copied them. When I played them on the desktop, they played perfectly.
I’ve just plugged the drive into the VIM4 and it isn’t even being ‘seen’ again. I’ve power cycled the VIM, which didn’t make any difference.
It still works in the NAS and my other computers however.
The drive doesn’t show up using lsusb and syslog contains this
Aug 19 06:31:37 localhost kernel: [ 88.015477@0] usb usb2-port1: attempt power cycle
Aug 19 06:31:41 localhost kernel: [ 92.179466@0] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
Aug 19 06:31:47 localhost kernel: [ 98.535687@0] usb usb2-port1: attempt power cycle
Aug 19 06:31:52 localhost kernel: [ 103.311660@0] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
Aug 19 06:31:52 localhost kernel: [ 103.311826@0] usb 2-1: the parent’s name is usb2
Aug 19 06:31:52 localhost kernel: [ 103.311868@0] usb usb2-port1: Device no response
Aug 19 06:31:56 localhost kernel: [ 107.383754@0] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
Aug 19 06:32:14 localhost kernel: [ 124.980104@0] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
Aug 19 06:32:24 localhost kernel: [ 135.308297@0] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
Aug 19 06:32:31 localhost kernel: [ 141.764446@0] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
Aug 19 06:32:36 localhost kernel: [ 147.332565@0] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
Aug 19 06:32:38 localhost Thunar[5986]: thunar-volman: There is no device with the sysfs path “/sys/devices/platform/soc/fde00000.crg3drd/xhci-hcd.0.auto/usb2/2-1”.
Unfortunately, the drive has a load of stuff on it that I don’t want to lose so I can’t do destructive testing with it ATM.
I’ve just tried a more powerful PSU and a different USB C cable but it didn’t make any difference. I tried a 64GB USB3 thumb drive which mounts, reads and writes perfectly. so the problem isn’t the USB socket. I removed the NVME drive from the USB caddy and plugged it into the socket on the board and it mounted fine. I’ll try writing and reading some stuff on it and let you know what happens.
I made an image of mmcblk0 to the NVME drive with dd then copied the image file to my NAS. I compared the two files and they were different.
I ‘restored’ the image files to a suitable SD card and put it in the VIM4 with the NVME drive unplugged. Neither of them would boot.
I made an image of mmcblk0 to my 64GB USB3 stick (also formatted as NTFS) with dd then copied the image to my NAS. I compared the two files and they were the same.
I ‘restored’ the image file to the same SD card I used previously and put it in the VIM4 with the USB stick unplugged and it booted perfectly.
So it seems that not only does the system have trouble reading from the NVME drive, it has trouble writing to it as well.
The other observation I would make is that dd took roughly the same time to write the image file to the NVME as it did to the USB3 stick. It managed ~37MB/sec compared to ~120MB/sec when I do the same thing to a share on the NAS mounted using cifs. I have restored the images saved direct to the NAS to the same SD card and they boot as well.
Everything you report is consistent with my experiences using a Sabrent M2 NVMe 1TB drive on my VIM4 with the MX2 extension card. This combination works as expected - tho’ at USB3 speeds - on my VIM3 Pro with mainline kernel (Armbian/Jammy).
I’ve now done some more testing with a Samsung Evo 970 Plus. I formatted it as NTFS and did a full backup of my desktop to it in the USB3 caddy (161GB at ~375 MB/sec) and verified it was OK.
I plugged it into the VIM4 and it wasn’t seen so I removed the drive and plugged it into to the board and power it up. It was detected but when I tried to create an image using dd, it managed about 12GB at ~33 MB/sec and stopped working. Not only did it dismount, it actually disappeared from the system. I powered off and back on then reformatted the drive as ext4 and tried to do a dd to an image. It only got a few GB in (but at ~125 MB/sec this time) when the same thing happened as the previous time.
Hello, everyone,
I’m trying to use m2x with M.2 SSD 980 EVO, but device didn’t see it. Maybe I don’t write some command to use it? (OS installed from OOWOW)
I checked device on Windows and it’s worked normally
Any suggestion please
