SteeMan

Moved to Community support area and adjusted tag for proper board identification

There are those of us that spend months working on these things. There is nothing about this that is easy. It is a hobby to waste a lot of time on. If you really wanted to proceed further you are really going to need to hook up to the debug serial port to get an ideal of the boot messages that are occuring. From an earlier post it looks like the serial connection points were identified and hooking up a USB serial adapter to them would give more information. But getting a random TV box working is usually a many month project as a lot needs to be learned about this while environment first.

No, the support for rk3399 is quite good. The problem is that each box/board needs someone to develop a device tree (dtb) for that box/board and each is different depending on the specifics of that box/board. That is what is lacking to support your box. (and if your box has obscure hardware on it, then those drivers may also be lacking)

You are missing something. The boot process starts with the uboot from the emmc (even if ultimately booting the SD card). And coreelec changes the uboot environment of the emmc in ways that are incompatible with with the armbian code. So you need to reflash a fresh android image if you want to use armbian as that will restore the basic state that armbian is expecting.

A google search indicates that the MXQ Pro 4K 5G often uses a RK3229 quad-core CPU

There are probably 20 different CPUs that have cortex a53 (cpus from Allwinner, Rockchip and Amlogic). TV box manufacturers all the time will use different CPUs in TV boxes that have the same external markings. Which ever component is the cheapest at the time of manufacture is what gets used. The only way to really be sure what you have is to look at the chip on the board (but even then there are cases where chip markings have been altered to make you think you have something else). Welcome to the world of TV boxes (and why Armbian doesn't support them officially because they are a mess).

First off, I would recommend using the "psuedo official" instructions from this site: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/33676-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus And there you will find the following warning: Note: If you have previously run other distributions on the box such as coreelec the below installation will not work. You will need to restore the original android firmware before attempting the install. coreelec changes the boot environment in ways that are incompatible with these Armbian builds.

No that is not true. These are not from Armbian. As I said earlier if your eMMC previously had Android (which defines and uses these special partitions) even after a normal Linux repartitioning these will still appear.

What guidance are you trying to follow?

There are various recent reports of windows corrupting the partition table.

How was this transfered? What was on the eMMC before the transfer? Was the eMMC wiped before the transfer? My guess is that your eMMC has Android loaded on it, you didn't wipe it and now you have partitions left over from the Android install.

I have only ever seen mmcblk?boot? Partitions on media that was setup for Android as the A/B is part of how Android installs updates and can fall back to the previous version. I've never seen them on an Armbian created media.

Specifically, your board is "Community Maintained" That means it is not supported by Armbian resources (beyond the automated infrastructure to make builds and host them for the community) https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/#community-maintained

Stable images can only be built by Armbian. All user built images are essentially rolling releases. But once booted into an image, you can use armbian-config to switch to the stable apt repositories, which means you won't get bug fixes or security updates to the kernel, but instead you get a stable kernel build released once every three months.

I'd suggest you start by reading this thread: