SteeMan

What you now need to capture is the initial boot loader messages, what you are showing here look to me to be messages from a booted android linux kernel

I don't know what pins you are connecting to on the board as your video doesn't show that. But if I had to guess the three pads labeled gnd,rx,tx just above what you are connecting to is what you want to be connecting to.

poweroff doesn't work on any of my boxes either. Does reboot work correctly for you? It does on my boxes, and I usually issue a reboot and then time a power disconnect when the drives have spun down and before they restart.

Only a guess, but the first thing I would look at is how this is connected to your t box as it seems to not be connecting correctly. Maybe some pictures of your connection points?

Why are you expecting this to work?

Moved to amlogic TV ox forum

You would just burn your downloaded image file to any USB storage, just like you would to an SD card (i.e. plug the USB storage into another device and burn the image to the storage)

Please read the FAQ and installation instructions linked on the download page. https://www.armbian.com/amlogic-s9xx-tv-box/

You are not using Armbian. Ophub is a fork of Armbian. They do not contribute to Armbian development nor do they participate in these forums. You need to go to ophub to ask this question, as no one here can help you.

Moved to userspace forum

As long as you don't install Armbian to your emmc, you should be able to still boot android by removing the SD and/or usb drives. Once you install to emmc you will overwrite the android installation

If you want to understand what should be happening under a normal installation: Installing "multiboot" (i.e. pressing the hidden reset button while powering the device) runs the script aml_autoscript That script sets some uboot environment variables that are used by subsequent boots The boot process for these boxes is to use the original android uboot to intiialize the device and then hand off the boot process to the u-boot.ext from armbian. This is done in the script s905_autoscript (or emmc_autoscript). Which then essentially just runs (for emmc): if fatload mmc 1 0x1000000 u-boot.ext; then go 0x1000000; fi; (or "mmc 0" for SD card). The chainloaded u-boot then boots via the information in the extlinux/extlinux.conf file.

Current Armbian uses extlinux to load, not uboot scripts. I can't help you unless you are willing to follow my suggestions, which you seem to not want to do.

Yes it errors because your uboot environment is screwed up by everything you have previously done. That is why I said you need to reinstall an original android firmware to set things back to a clean state before proceeding.

Given where you are, my only suggestion is to restore the box to a clean android firmware (so the uboot environment is restored to a clean state). Then restart with a current build (don't use the 6 year old build that you found somewhere). The two versions aren't compatible. Then get things running cleanly from SD card first, and then if you still want move the install to emmc.