[NVIDIA Jetson TX1] Boot Ubuntu from SATA HDD

Environment

• NVIDIA Jetson TX1

  https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded-computing
  

PreInstall

• Download JetPack for L4T
  Download from NVIDIA Developer Site

• Run JetPack L4T

  • ./JetPack-L4T-2.3-linux-x64.run
  • Select TX1 (64-bit) on Select Development Environment
  • Press Clear Actions
  • Select Install on Flash OS
  • After Flash OS, please check ubuntu on TX1 boots up from internal MMC

Connect SATA HDD to TX1

• Power off TX1
• Connect SATA HDD
• Power on TX1
• Check sudo blkid /dev/sda1 and returns the result.
• If not format SATA HDD with ext4 format.

Change boot entrypoint from MMC to SATA HDD

• Ensure IP Address of TX1
  • Assumed Host PC is 192.168.0.11
  • Assumed TX1 is 192.168.0.12

• Copy Downloaded files by JetPack L4T

  rsync -avh --progress jetpack_downloads/ ubuntu@192.168.0.12:/home/ubuntu/Downloads
  

  • jetpack_downloads exists under the same directory of JetPack-L4T-X.X-linux-x64.run

• Login to TX1, and create filesystem for SATA HDD

  ssh ubuntu@192.168.0.12
  cd Downloads
  tar xjf TegraXXX_Linux_XXXXXXX.tbz2
  cd Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs
  sudo tar xjf ../../Tegra_Linux_Sample-Root-Filesystem_XXXXXXX.tbz2
  cd ../
  sudo ./apply_binaries.sh
  sudo mkdir /media/ubuntu/sata
  sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/ubuntu/sata
  cd rootfs
  sudo cp -a * /media/ubuntu/sata
  sync
  umount /media/ubuntu/sata
  

• Change Boot Entrypoint to SATA

  sudo vi /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf
  

  edit below part

  < ... root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 ...
  ---
  > ... root=/dev/sda1 ...
  

• Reboot TX1

  sudo reboot
  

Check boot on SATA HDD

ubuntu@tegra-ubuntu:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       1.8T  3.3G  1.7T   1% /
none            1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           2.0G  168K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           2.0G  9.3M  2.0G   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           400M   68K  400M   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/mmcblk0p1   14G  7.1G  5.9G  55% /media/ubuntu/3b125ac7-4421-421e-b388-8a4a77c491ab

Here you can see that root mount point / has now 1.7TB available space of SATA HDD.
You can also see that original eMMC partition is mounted on /media/ubuntu/3b125ac7-4421-421e-b388-8a4a77c491ab.

Revert to boot from internal eMMC

In order to boot from eMMC, just revert entrypoint to eMMC by editing extlinux.conf.

sudo vi /media/ubuntu/3b125ac7-4421-421e-b388-8a4a77c491ab/boot/extlinux.conf

change

< ... root=/dev/sda1 ...
---
> ... root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 ...