u/After_Suspect7272 — reddlx

Hi all, hoping someone can help. I'm trying to boot Batocera on my Raspberry Pi 5 4GB from a SanDisk 1TB portable USB SSD and hitting a kernel panic every time.

Setup:

Raspberry Pi 5 4GB (Rev 1.1)
SanDisk 1TB portable USB SSD
Batocera bcm2712-42 image flashed via Balena Etcher
Official 27W USB-C PSU
Bootloader updated to latest version

What happens: The bootloader successfully finds and reads the SSD — it reads config.txt, device tree, kernel and initrd without errors. Then immediately kernel panics with:

Kernel panic - not syncing: Asynchronous SError Interrupt bcm2712_pull_config_set

What I've tried:

Both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports
Powered USB hub (rules out power issue)
Bootloader updated via Raspberry Pi Imager (green screen confirmed)
Same Batocera image boots fine from microSD

config.txt on the SSD:

arm_boost=1
arm_64bit=1
kernel=boot/linux
initramfs boot/initrd.lz4
dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d,cma-512
usb_max_current_enable=1
dtparam=krnbt=on

Any ideas? Many thanks