Hello. I have an Alta board and a HDD USB box connected to it. I write the Debian image for Alta using dd and my laptop. Then connect the HDD Box with the HDD inside it to the USB port of Alta. There is not uSD card or eMMC installed on the device. When I power on the device, it boots and recognizes my HID devices. But it doesn’t boot further. And I can’t use Ctrl+Alt+F2 (or any other function key) to access TTYs.
Let me know if you need anymore information.
I’ve noticed the same issue. Any USB device I try to boot the Debian/Raspi Libre images from causes the system-journald to spit out hundreds of lines of errors due to “read-only filesystem”, then the boot process halts. I’m running the current UEFI-BIOS for my Alta and using the recommended 5V power supply from Loverpi.
If you check-out Frank Davis @frankdavis6282 on Youtube, he documents this thoroughly in his 5 of 5 series for the Libre boards where he takes a working microSD card, puts it into a USB reader and tries to boot the Alta from it and it fails. He then takes the same microsd card and boots it from the microSD slot with no issue.
Since this is an S905 board, it’s probably subject to all the weird and wonderful issues that I’ve gradually worked my way past on Potato and Frite. Before we go into those weeds, there is a possible issue with power draw with any external drive. I have some older (MLC era!) SSDs that I can use in an unpowered enclosure, but even laptop HDDs and many more modern SSDs may draw more power than can be reliably delivered through these USB ports, no matter the capacity of the upstream 5V power source.
So you say you’re using a separate power supply, or maybe even tried booting from a lowly flash drive and it still barfs? Join me as I recount my long, strange trip to getting USB booting to work… eventually.