I've tested all of those OSes on an SSD with my Pi5 8GB when I first converted them, so I know they work.After reading that PINN seems to be very good, I bought a M.2 HAT+ 512 GB SSD to have the possibility to run different operating systems without having to change the SD card, and also to increase the speed and not be afraid of losing everything because the SSD card dies.
Using a Raspberry Pi 5B, 8GB, M.2 HAT+ 512 GB SSD
So I installed PINN on the SSD. I used an SD card with Raspberry Pi OS and Pi Imager to write directly to the nvme drive.
The second step was to install Recalbox, Ubuntu 24.04, Raspberry Pi OS, Batocera, Project Space 1 and a data partition.
The installation was easy, even if downloading the images was a little slow.
BUT after trying it several times incl. start over from zero there is only one OS running: Raspberry Pi OS.
Ubuntu stops the boot with a green screen and a pointer, Recalbox and Batocera are stopping with kernel panic.
I wonder what the reason could be that nothing works although some people have a lot of success with it.
But things have become a lot more complicated with the Pi5 as it requires a later kernel with KMS support and SSDs that are compatible with their HATS etc.
The problems you have experienced on each OS may not have the same cause. A kernel panic generally suggests a problem accessing the SSD partition, but you need to provide more information about the kernel panic.
The reading or parsing of the EDID from your monitor is a common problem for a lot of OSes on the Pi5, so you might want to try different HDMI leads or different monitors, or setting a specific screen resolution on the cmdline.txt with video= (see the official documentation on how to do that. This supercedes the previous config.txt settings of HMDI_MODE and HDMI_GROUP if you are used to those.)
Statistics: Posted by procount — Tue Apr 08, 2025 9:25 pm