Hello, I am following the instructions Getting Started BPI-R4 | BananaPi Docs I prepared an SD card with an openwrt snapshot from the openwrt.org website. I put the firmware for the router on a USB flash drive 32Gb in fat32 format. On the router itself I set it to boot from the SD card, the router starts up, I try to mount the flash drive in putty, but it gives an error that there is no flash drive. I installed opkg to support flash drives, as a result luci shows my flash drive, but I still can’t mount it
Mainline openwrt uses uboot menu to install to nand/nor/emmc. Usb2uart cable is required (ftdi recommended)
i.e. there is no other option? I don’t really want to buy something else just to write the firmware. And what ftdi do you recommend?
That’s not the correct way to do it. Use something like this to prepare the SD:
I used belenaether to prepare the SD card and the router starts up normally from it. And as I understand it, the USB flash drive needs to be formatted and the firmware file in img format needs to be placed in its root
What is the error you are getting when you try to mount the USB? Does it recognize the drive in fdisk?
As far as I remember, fdisk shows the presence of a flash drive, but when I try to mount it gives the error “drive not detected.” I’m writing through a translator, so I may write it wrong
fdisk will show you the state of your USB drive and will allow you to format it. But you can skip this step as well, and instead install first to EMMC using the instructions, boot from EMMC, you will have ~8GB to just copy the NAND image to the filesystem, after that you can follow the NAND installation process, i.e.: mtd erase /dev/mtd0 dd if=nand-image.img of=/dev/mtdblock0
Wait, where should I enter fdisk? Putty shows that there is no such command. I’m on windows 11