@bedna: Sixty-four 512-byte blocks is the same as eight 4k blocks from dd's perspective. In the GPT partition scheme, the first eight 4k blocks are blank.

Providing logs with armbianmonitor -u helps with troubleshooting and significantly raises chances that issue gets addressed.

Hello, I'm running Armbian Community 26.8.0 / kernel 6.18.35-current-rockchip64 CPU is quite hot, 56-60 C even when idling; it used to be around 43-45 C on the BSP image. I have a passive cooler mounted. So I added a fan and connected to the FAN header, but it does not spin. I seem to remember a "fan control" overlay within armbian-config for other boards, but it's not present here. Any suggestion? It's a nice board but it's too hot with Armbian 😕 Thanks!

Armbian 26.2.1 Noble XFCE (BSP Kernel: 6.1.115) + PanVk - 26.2.0~git2605212123.7b286abe336 (https://launchpad.net/~ernstp/+archive/ubuntu/mesaaco) + Box64 arm64 v0.4.3 42ae8b818 (https://ryanfortner.github.io/box64-debs/) + wine-proton-11.0-beta1-amd64-wow64 (https://github.com/Kron4ek/Wine-Builds/releases/download/proton-11.0-beta1/wine-proton-11.0-beta1-amd64-wow64.tar.xz) + DXVK-stripped v1.7.3 ~40fps@1536x864 Borderlands

If 2 images don't work, I start thinking that the images are OK, but something goes wrong after extracting/decompressing, writing to SD-card, and reading at power by the bootROM/maskROM and U-Boot. I have various images downloaded and checked the past months, only for topics like this and I remember only 1 being wrong (there was no rootfs, only bootloader). I do not have a BPI-M2S, so cannot really test on hardware. And hardware might be the issue. Quite often nowadays it is fake or counterfeit SD-card. Those should work OK for writing the image and even verifying, but after that all sorts of strange errors and corruption can happen. It might be something with MBR or GPT failing, but this is rare. You simply need to check much more, check the SD-card in other Linux computer with fdisk etc. And connect serial console cable, so you can seen U-Boot and kernel logs and also interrupt U-Boot and do manual scan commands. Ultimately, you might need to build an image yourself and use Btrfs instead of Ext4. Might also make U-Boot understand Btrfs. Then any block-level corruption will be detected as Btrfs has checksums on all storage blocks. I use it for more than a decade and it really helps catching issues, even after years the same Btrfs root filesystem. And bad SD-cards are easily detected. Note that there is also btrfs-convert, allows converting existing images or SD-cards, but is a bit tricky as you need to do a few other things w.r.t. bootloader.