Raspberry Pi 5 won't boot from M.2 NVMe Drive

1

Hey there,

I’m trying to get my Raspberry Pi 5 to boot from an M.2 NMVE Drive, but does not seem to see that it is there.

My setup is a Raspberry Pi 5 w. 8GB Ram. It is in an Argon ONE V3 M.2 NVMe PCIE case and am using a 1TB M.2 sata ssd from PNY.

Now I’ve used the 1TB drive for other tasks and had recently decided to use it as the main drive in this setup, even went as far as to image it with the Raspberry Pi Lite 64bit using the Rasperry Pi Imager on on my Mac (never had an issue there) using a usb NVMe case to connect it to my computer. I did assemble the case correctly, though the ribbon cable was a bit fiddly getting it connected to the board the M.2 drive connects to. IDK what I’m doing/did wrong here.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Tai

2

I presume you’ve done the obvious things like checking the cable is the right way up, and your drive isn’t a known problem model.

This is what works for me:

I use an SD Card to boot the Pi and manipulate the NVMe drive.

Make sure you have added the following lines to the bottom of /boot/firmware/config.txt in both the host SD Card you are using to set up the NVMe drive, and on the NVMe drive itself.

# Enable NVMe
dtparam=nvme
dtparam=pciex1_gen=3
# Argone ONE power
usb_max_current_enable=1

When your Pi recognises the drive, set the boot order in raspi-config to boot from NVMe.

Plug a monitor into one of the HDMI ports and see what messages there are - they can be helpful when troubleshooting.

3

I did as you suggested, but the system booted back to the sd card, even though I’m positive that the NVMe drive has an OS on it, Raspberry Pi Lite 64 bit. No idea what’s wrong or if I did something wrong.

4

I have even tried flipping the ribbon cable backwards and even switching to the other cable included in the kit and nothing seems to work.

5

Ok, I feel kinda stupid now. I checked the NVMe drive I was trying to use against the currently supported NVMes listed on the site for the the case and I was trying to use a PNY CS900 which is currently not on the list sigh. Off to the online shopping places for a deal on one of the compatible drives.

6

OK, I went and got one of the supported NVMe drives listed on the store page and set it up with the case I’m using. Tried booting as is with and without the micro SD card and have tried flipping the ribbon cable around a couple different ways and tinkering with the code listed above, but I am still stuck. I am getting quite frustrated with trying to get an NVMe drive setup with my Pi 5.

Any help is greatly appreciated. TYIA