i need help w pi imager and ssh, headless, oops, user error

[sdetweil]

@karsten13 nope, right after flash, those files are not there.
the firstrun and cmdline.txt have todays date, I am showing hidden files (if any)

[sdetweil]

well then…

turns out the pi5 I picked to bring with me has the nvme hat on, and boots to the nvme drive, NOT the sd card…doah!!..

after some thinking, I found the right user/pw combo…

never mind…

BUT that explains why the sd card wasn’t used!!

[karsten13]

@sdetweil

and I learned more about pi imager, the stuff it writes seems to depend on the OS, with my examples above I used fedora, now looking at a raspian pi os lite I don’t see the files.

There now is a userconf.txt with only user/password …

[sdetweil]

@karsten13 I don’t see that at all on bookworm full

[rkorell]

@sdetweil said

I am not a system setup guy.

Dear Sam,
you may aware of this - than please ignore it…

You’ve described that you have put a SD card in your NVME-HAT’ed Pi and your Pi has not booted from SD but from NVME…

You can steer this with the BOOT_ORDER entry in eeprom configuration.
This code is read right to left to determine the boot order and should (in your case) be: 0xf461:

1 = Check SD card
6 = Check PCIe NVME
4 = Check USB drive
f = Start again

You can check this:

sudo rpi-eeprom-config

If boot order is not as desired you can edit this with

sudo -E rpi-eeprom-config --edit

enter or modify to:
BOOT_ORDER=0xf461

(In my configuration this opens the nano editor in which ctrl-O writes the changes to disk and ctrl-X leaves the editor.
eeprom-config then modifies the system and a reboot is neccessary)

With this configuration you will lose a tiny bit of time for the SD-card check but it enables you to insert a SD card and boot from there despite the NVME is connected as well.

Regards,
Ralf

[sdetweil]

@rkorell thanks. i had clearly set the boot order wrong.

[rkorell]

@sdetweil This is a single error :-)
try to count mine - you will win ! :-)

[sdetweil]

@rkorell this is not a contest. if we all work together things will always improve

[rkorell]

@sdetweil you’re absolutely true!

• just kidding !

Ralf

[sdetweil]

@rkorell i knew you were teasing me. thank you for that!