Is there a way to boot linux from sata drive, or onboard memory?

You can easily boot from USB disk/sata drive, look at this.

OrangePi can boot from SD card or NAND but not from HDD.  Booting from NAND takes a bit of work.  Booting from SD card and running from HDD is easy - you just need to copy the root file system (generally /dev/mmcblk0p2) to /dev/sda1 and then change uEnv.txt in the boot partition (/dev/mmcblk0p1) so "root=/dev/sda1".  You will probably need to change /etc/fstab also if it references /dev/mmcblk0p2.  Then the OrangePi will run from SD card until it loads uImage then it will run from HDD.

Cheers,
Steven

Thanks for the reply, I have a sata disk hooked up with the same image. It will be a couple day before I can try the suggestion.

The android image boot fine from the onboard memory. I think I will leave it alone and see if we end up with a way to create an account so we can run the playstore.
If not I will go ahead with Lubuntu.
Thanks for the help.

What about Orange Pi Plus? Is possible to boot up from sata drive?

Thank you.