Sige 5 SD Boot Issue – Ubuntu and Debian First Boot Works, Second Boot Enters Maintenance Mode

Hello ArmSoM Support,

I am seeing the same repeatable SD-card boot issue on the ArmSoM Sige 5 with both Ubuntu and Debian images.

A newly flashed MicroSD card boots successfully the first time. After rebooting the board, the second boot enters Linux maintenance mode.

Observed Behavior

  1. Flash a new Ubuntu or Debian image to a MicroSD card.
  2. Insert the card into the ArmSoM Sige 5.
  3. First boot completes successfully.
  4. Reboot the board.
  5. The second boot stops in maintenance mode.

The SD root filesystem itself is still mounting correctly, so the problem does not appear to be failure to boot from the MicroSD card.

Engineering Findings

During troubleshooting, the SD root filesystem mounted successfully from:

/dev/mmcblk1p3

The internal eMMC was detected as:

mmcblk0

The /etc/fstab configuration contained:

PARTLABEL=oem /oem ext2 defaults 0 2

PARTLABEL=userdata /userdata ext2 defaults 0 2

However, lsblk -f showed the corresponding partitions as:

mmcblk0p7 ext4 oem

mmcblk0p8 ext4 userdata

The boot then reported mount failures for /oem and /userdata , and systemd showed:

oem.mount failed

userdata.mount failed

The system subsequently entered maintenance mode.

Summary

The behavior appears to be caused by a filesystem-type mismatch between the /etc/fstab entries and the actual oem and userdata partitions.

Because the same behavior is seen with both Ubuntu and Debian SD images, this may be related to a common Sige 5 image or first-boot configuration rather than an Ubuntu-specific issue.

Questions

Could you please confirm:

  1. Is this a known issue with the current Sige 5 Ubuntu and Debian images?
  2. Should the oem and userdata partitions be configured as ext2 or ext4?
  3. Does a first-boot script modify /etc/fstab or these partitions?
  4. Is there an official corrected image available?
  5. What is the recommended permanent fix for repeated SD-card deployments?

There are manual fixes that work. That is suitable for R &D, not production.

For building Ubuntu and Debian images, I suggest you download the source code and build from GitHub - ArmSoM/manifests: ARMSOM series board source code repository · GitHub