Hello,
Has anyone had any success with attempting to boot BalenaOS from a NVMe drive on a Raspberry Pi 5 using the M.2 HAT+ ? I am attempting to only have to use the NVMe drive and no micro sd card. If this is not possible, than I will use a small microSD card with the NVMe drive.
For reference, I am using this hat: M.2 HAT+ for Raspberry Pi 5
Hello @jcv
Let me ask internally if anyone has succeeded on booting from NVMe on Raspberry Pi 5. We will keep you posted 
Yes, I have balenaOS running from NVMe using the Pimoroni NVMe base . It works really well but isn’t as easy to set up. What I did was set up the hardware and boot raspberry pi OS from SD card on the pi5. Then from the piOS desktop I used the pi imager to flash the balenaOS image onto the nvme drive. Then you just shutdown, remove the SD card and power it back up and it will boot balenaOS from the nvme drive 
Hi @jcv,
I also have balenaOS on Pi5 booting from NVMe. Using the official M.2 HAT+. As long as your Pi5 EEPROM version is 5 June 2024 or newer, you may not need to do anything special e.g. you don’t need to change the boot order. I just flashed directly to NVMe, put it in the HAT+, and booted.
Earlier I booted a Pi5 from a Pineberry HatDrive Bottom. That was in January and I did have to update the EEPROM to 1) enable PCIe, 2) add PCIe (NVMe) to the boot order. I used Pi OS on an SD card to update the EEPROM. That EEPROM updating may no longer be necessary for the HatDrive.
I should have tried that before making the post! That worked perfectly with my official M.2 HAT+
Thank you!