Failure to initialize on first boot

When I tried to re-image my system (upgrading to NVME on RPi 5). I was running into a date issue.
It would not update to the current date/time and because of that, one of the certificates was “Not yet valid”.
My solution was to boot the Pi with a monitor and keyboard and issue the commands:

login
date

followed by

date -s “2026-03-03 08:30:00”

(Using the format shown by the previous date command)
followed by a:

reboot now

command. The system started right up and was able to be restored from a backup.