The ultimate starter guide to FriendlyElec CM3588 (RK3588)

[Lochie A]

I’ve fixed the problem. After running dmesg it reported an error when detecting two devices with the same ID. I contacted the friendlyelec support and they suggested updating the kernel. After the update both drives are now detected and mount properly and OMV picks both up. 

[msknight]

I'd like to help on this, but I'm stuck. So far after 10 days I'm still no further forward with my failed unit and I'm waiting for them to contact about return procedure. I'm expecting in the long run, that they'll probably replace it and I'll have to shoulder the return postage costs to China, but how long it will take to get to that point I don't know; it's looking like a long time. Couple this along with what seems to be a lack of resilience in the design, and I don't think I'll be buying anything further from them. After all, I'd be relying on this for data storage and the risk/failure/response balance isn't impressive. The only bonus is that if I used ZFS, I would be able to hook the drives up to another machine to get the data back... but that's not enough to change my mind.

[WittyAdrian]

I'm in a similar boat as @TheHawzzy where I just feel in over my head. I booted the board up and hooked it up to a screen, then noticed the board came preloaded with Android. Since I'm planning to use it for backups and a media server, I wanted to install OMV instead so I figured I'd just follow the steps in the wiki. I had some trouble using an old SD card of mine as it failed to lock it or something, which meant I couldn't set it up as a bootable device. So then I tried using a USB cable to install OMV using the RKDevTool that FriendlyElec provides. I was able to get the board into Mask mode, which then allowed me to install OMV. But when the device reset it just booted right back up into Android. Weirdly enough after that anytime I'd try to use the same trick to check the board or just install OMV again, it kept failing.

 

I tried looking around to see if there's something else I need to do in order to boot into a different OS or something, but everywhere I look people are just using SSH to install and configure stuff, which I can't do as far as I can see. None of the ports are open and since it just looked like a fairly barebones Android install, I don't imagine much is possible either. 

 

Some absolute beginner steps would be very much appreciated. I just don't know how to get past the stock Android that came preloaded and install some of the images provided in the wiki. Or do I just need to get a new SD card (reader) and use that to install things on there? I also thought I could just use a bootable USB drive, but it seems that's not an option? Thanks in advance for any help!

[Fragged Rabbit]

I just finished setting this NAS up. I bought 2 pi fans but cant seem to figure out where I plug them in at.

 

• Do I need to buy any specific adapter/molex to plug these 2 fans in?
• How and what am I missing here?

[msknight]

15 hours ago, WittyAdrian said:

I'm in a similar boat as @TheHawzzy where I just feel in over my head.

You need the images which are "SD to eMMC" - which one you choose is down to you - download one of those and blow it to the Micro SD card.

When the system boots, it will transfer the image to the internal flash and then you can remove the SD card and it should boot from the eMMC.

[WittyAdrian]

I finally got it working. Turns out the SD card I was using was faulty and simply didn't work. Also the tool that they give you for flashing to an SD card (win32diskimager) just didn't work for me, it kept giving errors about not being able to lock the volume or some such. I ended up using BalenaEtcher instead and that worked like a dream.