Nvme boot stuck on "player preparing startup"

[Wheaten]

Unfortunately, the WD Black SN850 2TB NVMe SSD is not recommended for use with the Raspberry Pi 5 due to compatibility issues with its controller chip.

Here’s what you need to know:

• The SN850 uses a Phison controller, which has been reported to cause problems on the Pi 5’s PCIe interface.
• Many WD drives, including the SN850 and SN850X, may require an extra SUSCLK clock signal that the Pi 5 doesn’t provide.
• Users have experienced issues like the drive not being recognized at all, or failing to boot, even when using compatible NVMe HATs.

Please have a look at this topic, which offers working combinations:

PCIe NVMe compatibility

With the rise of popularity of the PCIe NVMe storage on Raspberry Pi latest devices starting this thread to share our experiences. As a starting point please explore excellent overview and write-up with the caveat that the NVMe boards are now readily available and variety is increasing on the daily basis. We also have a quick guide discussing how to prepare Raspberry Pi5 to interact with PCIe storage boot process. Volumio implementation Active-State Power Management (ASPM) saves power in the P…