SteeMan

@CODER2127 in the same directory /boot. I have updated the instructions to clarify

The item description pretty much has all the information you need: Q Plus Android Box H616 Quad-core So the box name is the Q Plus And it has an Allwinner H616 cpu

When you have been involved with Armbian for a length of time (and read a few of igor's rants 🙂 ) you will realize why what was said here will not be received well by many within Armbian. It isn't that what you are saying isn't a reasonable comment. The problem is that Armbian is under resourced by probably an order of magnitude. Discussions are continually occurring on how the project can survive let alone move forward. Many of those conversations involve discussing how more can be done with less resources, ways to cut features/scope to make what exists manageable. So by you saying to "put [more work] onto developers in Armbian is far better than ..." you are hitting a nerve. In the current environment that will never pass muster. Any proposed solution needs to maintain or reduce developer work in the long term. So any feature suggestion is going to be measured first against that metric, then secondarily by the merits of that feature. This whole dtd discussion is fundamentally a request for a new feature for Armbian. Regardless of the merits of your focus on the end user experience, that isn't the way Armbian has handled dtbs in any of the existing boards that are supported. I'm not saying that what exists is good or desireable, but it is what it is. Can it be improved, sure. Can it be improved and at the same time not increase maintenance costs going forward, maybe.

I have no other suggestions. I've not run into your situation before. And no there is no way to restore a firmware via uart.

What do you mean by this? You have the usb burning tool running when you plug the male usb to male usb cable into the tv box correct? And also you are not connecting the tv box to power, but letting it be powered from the usb cable?

There is no work being done currently to support this ancient cpu for TV Boxes. You might be able to find something four or five years old by searching the archives.

Have you tried all of these things I have recommended? What different versions of usb burning tool have you tried?

How do you know the box is going straight to uboot? When you are connecting usb burning tool from a pc, there are no other items connected to the box other than the male usb to male usb cable.

Yes as sure as I can be. I have replaced u-boots on emmc and still been able to run usb burning tool to recover the android firmware. But there are hundreds of different TV Boxes, so I can't speak for all, just the ones i have worked with.

Note that this thread is archived. Current information can be found at: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/33676-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus

Here are the reasons to run off of emmc: emmc is faster than SD emmc is more durable than SD. Both emmc and SD have limited lifes due to the number of write cycles they support. But emmc should last longer than SD before wearing out Reasons to stay with SD: The ability to pop out the SD card and replace it with another or to move it to another device to read/write the contents is sometimes very useful SD cards can give you more storage than the onboard emmc

This issue should now be fixed. The s905x2 and s905x3 chain loaded u-boot has been updated to address the issue introduced with 23.02 and later builds. Any build after 2023/01/31 should incorporate the fix (so the current community builds as of today have the fix) and this will appear in the 24.02 release builds.

The uboot has nothing to do with the Amlogic burning tool, the tool connects before uboot starts. I have needed to try different versions of usb burning tool for different boxes. Tried different usb ports (generally only one usb port will work with the tool), And sometimes need to press the reset button for different lengths of time to get it to register.

So I guess getting back to your original question: Did you make a backup of the EMMC before you overwrote it? Do you have an original android firmware for your box? Yes you can restore the box, but how you do that depends on what you are restoring from.

Interesting. I didn't know that existed. It must be a wrapper for the functionality available through armbian-config (or vise-versa). Either way the standard Armbian functionality doesn't work with the amlogic TV box builds and will not leave you with a working EMMC install. That is why the amlogic TV box install instructions give the correct alternative. Regardless of that, your logs show that you are booting from sd card. And the state of your EMMC shouldn't cause the type of error you are seeing.

Start here: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17106-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus

Moved post to correct forum. Your board isn't supported by Armbian, but you were posting in the supported boards section, that is why you couldn't apply the correct board tag. Moved to community maintained/ unsupported

Also, you mentioned armbian-install, but I'm assuming you meant armbian-config. As there is no armbian-install. Unless you are using the ophub images which have a script called armbian-install, but they aren't armbian but a fork of armbian.

Based on the logs you posted, it is booting from SD when you have the SD card inserted. I don't know why it is erroring in that way. I would try a more recent image and see if that might work.

I think your real question is why hasn't Rockchip put in the effort to get these drivers into mainline linux? It isn't the goal of Armbian to be the repository of large amounts of unmaintained code. The goal is really to bring mainline linux to devices. But that assumes that everyone else is working to bring various bits and pieces from custom linux forks to mainline linux. While sometimes it is necessary to temporarily host code that has been ported to mainline, but not yet incorporated upstream, most of the efforts should be to get the code into upstream mainline linux.

The instructions you are using are 4 years old. No longer relevant. Wrong. That does not work for the TV box builds. You need to be following the current instructions in the TV Box FAQ: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17106-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus

It reports it is full, probably because it is full. The last set of commands @going suggested you run are to try to figure out what has filled up the storage. du -s will be your tool in looking as where the storage is being used. Google for how others use this command for this purpose.

It looks like that box is using an amlogic s805 cpu (which is a very old 32 bit cpu). The amlogic s905 was their move to 64 bit cpu. There isn't any currently active work that I am aware of to support this cpu anytime recently. There is a very old thread dedicated to this cpu:

Lets start with some basic information: What build are you using? What installation instructions are you using?

Did you no read what I wrote? If you want help that thread is where you need to post your question/issue.