Wich board to correctly move OS to an external HDD

[oly]

Hello,

Five years ago, I bought a LIME2 SERVER package (no more available) with

- 1 A20-OLinuXino-LIME2
- 1 metal box for it
- 1 metal case for SATA HDD
- 1 shield to connect HDD to OlinuXino, linking the box to the case
- 1 power supply


Nowdays, your product line offers many references for A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 with different options.
I've just bought a T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-IND and tryed to use your tool 'olinuxino-sd-to-sata'.
Doing so, I discover that without SPI flashmemory, I need to keep the SD card pluged inside the board so that the system can boot from HDD.
This is not what I want ...

Should I buy the T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-s16M-IND  version in order to use it only from    an SATA HDD (without SD card) ?

[LubOlimex]

Yes. This is expected behavior. The T2/A20 Boot ROM cannot boot directly from SATA. Its supported boot sources are SD/MMC, NAND, SPI NOR, and USB/FEL—SATA is absent. So you need a middle storage medium for the u-boot (SD/MMC, NAND, SPI NOR, and USB/FEL—SATA) between the main chip T2/A20 BROM and the SATA hard-disk.

Boards without 16MB SPI flash aka "-s16M" can't boot directly into the hard disk without the help of additional storage (either SD card or SPI flash). The U-Boot is too big to be stored on the EEPROM!

So options are - get "s16M" variant, or use SD card only for the U-Boot. USB/FEL—SATA doesn't appear like viable option since this requires another computer running sunxi-fel uploading the U-Boot on every cold boot. Same for NAND, NAND is not supported by mainline, and if you use eMMC an extra step through the EEPROM is needed, and our software doesn't support that option.