• just kidding !

Ralf

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

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 …

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!!

files should be in same directory as config.txt and cmdline.txt. Maybe the OS deletes them after initial reading? So you may have to look for this files before you insert the sd-card into the pi …

example of user-data:

[mm@pi4-argon efi]$ cat user-data
#cloud-config
hostname: pi4-argon
manage_etc_hosts: true
packages:
- avahi-daemon
apt:
  conf: |
    Acquire {
      Check-Date "false";
    };

users:
- name: mm
  groups: users,adm,dialout,audio,netdev,video,plugdev,cdrom,games,input,gpio,spi,i2c,render,sudo
  shell: /bin/bash
  lock_passwd: false
  passwd: $5$wEw...
  ssh_authorized_keys:
    - ssh-rsa AAAA...
  sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL


timezone: Europe/Berlin
keyboard:
  model: pc105
  layout: "de"

example of network-.con:

[mm@pi4-argon efi]$ cat network-.con
version: 2
wifis:
  renderer: networkd
  wlan0:
    dhcp4: true
    optional: true
    access-points:
      "k13":
        password: "cbd..."

there is no user-data, there is a script firstrun.sh which is linked to the cmdline.txt

systemd.run=/boot/firstrun.sh systemd.run_success_action=reboot

but it has not created the user I defined… only pi is in /home

so my guess is the firstrun.sh didn’t
and it never reboots

on the sd card, firstrun.sh and cmdline.txt are the only two changed files,
yesterday at noon, which is when the last flash finished

same userid/password I always use for sbc systems to test…
same wifi and password too…

there is junk in the files… nothing I can understand…

I am not a system setup guy.
mac cannot access the rootfs partition, only the bootfs
can’t get the sd card attached to the ubuntu VM… gr…

another interesting fact, if I open the settings in the imager to flash another
the password fields (user and wifi) are filled with junk text, maybe encrypted… but the values I entered are not visible

thats normal

which version of pi imager are you using? Latest which is v1.9.0?

And you are using the right user + passwd (I often forget to set the correct user)?

The pi imager writes a file user-data into the root dir of the sd-card which has yaml content, you can check the content (e.g. user) and also try to override passwd, maybe it works unencrypted, otherwise you can try to encrypt with htpasswd.

wifi has own file network-.con (yaml too).