SteeMan

@yopp  I assume you are following these instructions: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17106-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus
 
And you specifically are following this note: 
 
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.
 
If you have previously booted coreelec, armbian will not boot.

Already fixed: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/4954

@vitor  Have you paid for support?  Armbian is composed of volunteers who donate their time.  If no volunteer desires to work on any particular board/feature/bug, no one is getting paid to be told to add such board/feature/bug.  This is open source so anyone can go in and make changes/fixes/improvements and then hopefully submit them back for others to benefit from.  First and foremost Armbian provides a place (forums, frameworks, source code) for anyone to join the volunteer community and help support the wide variety of boards that are out there.

@vitor  Have you paid for support?  Armbian is composed of volunteers who donate their time.  If no volunteer desires to work on any particular board/feature/bug, no one is getting paid to be told to add such board/feature/bug.  This is open source so anyone can go in and make changes/fixes/improvements and then hopefully submit them back for others to benefit from.  First and foremost Armbian provides a place (forums, frameworks, source code) for anyone to join the volunteer community and help support the wide variety of boards that are out there.

This is good to know.  I'm only starting to upgrade to Win11, so I haven't run into this yet.  But I can pass this advice on to others.

These instructions are for Amlogic CPUs for TV Boxes. 
 
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.
 
Download links:
    Weekly Community Rolling Builds:  https://www.armbian.com/amlogic-s9xx-tv-box/
    or build your own image using the Armbian build framework
 
Once you download your chosen build, you need to burn the image to an SD card.  Generally balenaEtcher is recommended as it does a verification of the burn.  Also be sure to use high quality SD cards.
 
Once you have the SD card with your chosen build, then you need to edit the boot configuration file on the SD card.  In the BOOT partition of the SD card there will be a file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf, that you need to edit.  There will also be a extlinux.conf.template file to use as a reference.  You will need to add a line into the extlinux.conf file for the Device Tree (dtb) file you will be using for your box.  Place this line before the APPEND line as shown in the .template file.
 
Basically you need to have the correct dtb for your box.  You may need to attempt to use different dtb files until you find the one that works the best for your box's hardware (there are a bunch of dtb files in /boot/dtb/amlogic/... to try depending on your cpu architecture and hardware).  It is unlikely that there will be a matching dtb file for your TV box.  The idea is to find the one that works best for your box.  This may mean that you try booting with different dtb files until you fine one that works good enough for your needs.  By searching the forums you will find information about what dtbs other users have found work best for different boxes.  Because you are booting from an SD card, you can easily try different dtb files.  The dtd files are named by cpu family.  So for example dtb files for the s905x2 cpu are named meson-g12a-*.  Below there is a table that shows the identifiers for each familiy (g12a for s905x2 in this case).
 
Next you need to copy the correct uboot for your box.  This is needed for how these builds boot on amlogic boxes.  There are four different u-boot files located in the /boot directory:  u-boot-s905, u-boot-s905x-s912, u-boot-s905x2-s922, u-boot-s905x3
You need to copy (note copy not move) the u-boot file that matches your cpu to a new file named u-boot.ext in the /boot directory
So for example with a TX3 mini box that has an s905w cpu you would copy u-boot-s905x-s912 to u-boot.ext: cp u-boot-s905x-s912 u-boot.ext
(See table below for more details on which u-boot to use for which cpu)
 
Once you have your SD card prepared you need to enable multiboot on the box.  There are different ways documented to do this, but the most common is the "toothpick" method.  The "toothpick" method means to hold the reset button while applying power to the box.  The reset button is often hidden and located at the back of the audio/video jack connector.  By pressing that button with a toothpick or other such pointed device you can enable multiboot.  What you need to do is have the box unplugged, have your prepared sd card inserted, then press and hold the button while inserting the power connector.  Then after a bit of time you can release the button.  (I don't know exactly how long you need to hold the button after power is applied, but if it doesn't work the first time try again holding for longer or shorter times).
 
You should now be booting into armbian/linux.  Note that the first boot takes longer as it is enlarging the root filesystem to utilize the entire SD card.
 
After you are satisfied that your box is working correctly for your needs you can optionally copy the installation from the SD card to internal emmc storage (assuming your box has emmc). (Note: Installing to emmc has some risks of bricking your box.  Don't do this unless you feel you understand how to reinstall your box's android firmware)  You install armbian to emmc by running the shell script in the /root directory: install-aml.sh. Note: It is not possible to install into emmc on boxes with the s905 cpu (s905x, s905w, s905x2, etc however should all be supported).  It is recommended that you make a backup of emmc first.  Also be prepared if anything goes horribly wrong with your emmc install to reinstall the android firmware using the Amlogic USB Burning Tool to unbrick your device.  If you have or can find an original android firmware on the internet and you can generally (but not always) recover a bricked box using the Amlogic tool and the original firmware file.
 
 
Mapping from CPU to uboot and dtb:
 
u-boot-s905
s905 - gxbb
 
u-boot-s905x2-s912
S905X - gxl
S905W - gxl
S905D - gxl
S905L - gxl
S805X - gxl
S912 - gxm
A311D - gxm
 
u-boot-s905x2-s922
S905X2 - g12a
S922 - g12b
 
u-boot-s905x3
S905X3 - sm1
 
Not supported or not tested
S805 -
S905W2 -
S905X4 -
S805X2 - s4
A113D - axg
A113X - axg
 
 
 
Note: Followup posts in this thread should be limited to comments to improve or better understand these instructions.  Other issues should be posted as new questions in the Amlogic CPU Boxes sub-forum.

@SuperMaximus  What exactly are you trying to accomplish and why?  In your post in this other thread (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/21590-rotate-armbian-logo-in-startup-splash-screen/#comment-161028) you are asking about changing the boot logo, here you are asking to disable the video output.  Those are very different things.  I think if you are looking to disable video output during boot, @jock suggestions are the way to go, and yes that is invasive and would involve low level changes that would require building a custom image.  If you are looking to change the boot logo as you indicated elsewhere, then look at my followup post to that.  If you are looking to do something else, you need to be more specific in your question.  Otherwise Jock and I are wasting our time trying to guess what you are trying to accomplish.
 

@SuperMaximus  What exactly are you trying to accomplish and why?  In your post in this other thread (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/21590-rotate-armbian-logo-in-startup-splash-screen/#comment-161028) you are asking about changing the boot logo, here you are asking to disable the video output.  Those are very different things.  I think if you are looking to disable video output during boot, @jock suggestions are the way to go, and yes that is invasive and would involve low level changes that would require building a custom image.  If you are looking to change the boot logo as you indicated elsewhere, then look at my followup post to that.  If you are looking to do something else, you need to be more specific in your question.  Otherwise Jock and I are wasting our time trying to guess what you are trying to accomplish.
 

@madade  Why do you ask for help again when you haven't provided the information that Igor asked of you.
He asked you for four things:
You only provided an answer to one request.
 
Which hardware revision (picture please)?
Where does booting end? (capture of the console output of the boot)
Try another sd card.  (Just because a card works in some circumstances, doesn't mean it will work for this purpose, sbc's are finicky when it comes to sd cards at times)

@madade  Why do you ask for help again when you haven't provided the information that Igor asked of you.
He asked you for four things:
You only provided an answer to one request.
 
Which hardware revision (picture please)?
Where does booting end? (capture of the console output of the boot)
Try another sd card.  (Just because a card works in some circumstances, doesn't mean it will work for this purpose, sbc's are finicky when it comes to sd cards at times)

Well this is a completely different subject, but yeah, valid. That probably/finally explains why media had double-patches to mkdebian/builddeb (which was already patched/replaced by Armbian before patches applied). I was trying to understand that, for months, and failed. Not a single comment explained it, as seems to be Oleg's policy. I will revisit it now that I know wth is going on and maybe it will make sense, but sincerely...
 
Currently and before:
- linux-image: has kernel, modules, and DTs (!), (in /usr/lib/<kernel_id>) -- as expected by standard Debian tooling (u-boot-menu, flash-kernel, etc). We had a long discussion about this, 2 years ago. Did we forget? (No, it was just Oleg said he agreed, but ignored it and patched his own stuff "secretly" sans any explanation or discussion).
- linux-dtb: has DTs in /boot (as expected by "most" Armbian families, using u-boot and bootscripts, also the armbian-install, config, overlays, etc).
 
Either way, we can definitely accommodate this "single pkg" need, but I'd like to do it in a way that is 1) comprehensible 2) usable by more families than just one 3) not a maintenance nightmare, eg, NOT double-patching. I don't think that is unreasonable.
 
So if we could spell out what is the need, it would be easier... again: let's work together. we've 2 months to figure out stuff before release. 

I understand now that it seems that I just blindly changed the way `media` works and am crazy... might even be true, but, we can fix, and would already have fixed if more engineer talk and less drama. IMHO.

This is expected behavior.  Each distribution is modifying the boot environment in different incompatible ways.  That is why the install instructions (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17106-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus) say if you have tried to install other distributions, you will need to restore to a clean android firmware before installing armbian.
 

I'm pretty sure this is a bug and I have logged it as such: https://github.com/armbian/build/issues/4905

First question I have is what build did you install (name of file) from where (where did you download from) and what instructions are you using?
 
Second point, it if you have a tx3 mini, that is using the s905w cpu, that CPU only supports 2GB of ram.  So something doesn't make sense.  Why do you think you have 4GB ram?

@desperex You would have to ask Orange PI that question, as that is their name for their board.

@desperex Armbian doesn't have the resources to track bugs and work for fixes in upstream code.  We generally just take upstream code and incorporate.  So someone external to Armbian needs to work the upstream producers to get them to make fixes as appropriate.  The problem is that for many of these inexpensive commodity chips/drivers there isn't any long term support infrastructure (i.e. they produce, release and then move on to the next chip with no intention to support them)

Did you remove the SD card after the copy to emmc?  I suspect the boot order is SD first, then mmc and based on your post, if it is still booting to sd that would imply you have an sd card inserted for it to boot from.

This post is not Armbian related and therefore off topic.  However since the information is generic others might find it useful so the post is being allowed, in the hopes that someone would pick up this work and bring it into the Armbian fold.  Any volunteers ?

I tested the 23.02.1 aml-s9xx-box builds against all the amlogic TV boxes I have and they worked as expected.

Which dtb are you using?
 
Since you found someone who apparently got these things working, you would probably be best served by reaching out to them to see what they did to get wifi/sound working on this box.  It looks like they forked their build from armbian a while back and here is a link to the diff between the base armbian they forked from and their set of changes: https://github.com/armbian/build/compare  (Your answers are somewhere in that diff).  Since I don't own that box, there isn't much I can do beyond pointing you in these directions.

Have you tried installing armbian-firmware-full?

You are not using Armbian.  You have downloaded software from a site that is a fork of Armbian and uses the Armbian name without permission.  They do not participate in Armbian development, nor do they participate in these forums.  We can't help you here as we don't produce the code you are running.  You need to log your question with those you downloaded your software from.

If your emmc is not working, I don't think you can.  My understanding is that these amlogic boxes basically are hard coded to look for uboot on emmc.  That is why the aml-s9xx-box builds use the emmc uboot to then chain load the distribution from sd/usb/etc.  It is always using the emmc uboot initially.  If your emmc is working, you should use recovery to reinstall the android uboot and then you could move on from there.  But in your case you have already tried that, and it didn't work (likely indicating that your emmc is not working).  Based on your comments, it sounds like you have previously reinstalled the android firmware, so you know that process used to work (the reason I am stating this, is that sometimes different boards/firmware combinations require specific versions of the amlogic burning tool)

Another factor is that at least as far as the armbian builds go, there is no uboot suitable for your box available.  It isn't feasible/possible to build uboots for the hundreds of different tv box hardware configurations out there (and the tv box manufacturers don't release their source for their android uboots), so the uboot on the armbian build sd card is basically just a place holder (generic uboot that 100% is guaranteed not to work for your box).  The whole armbian amlogic tv box strategy is to use the uboot that comes with the tv box on emmc.  So if you are trying to get something working from sd, it isn't going to be armbian unless you can get your emmc working again.

I would recommend that you first start with a pre-built image (https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-pc) Then if you want use the armbian build system (https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Build-Preparation/)
Then you might be able to track down why the Debos isn't working as you think it should.