DRAGO4k

Quick question for everyone here, what SATA to usb bridges do you guys use, I have a couple of jm20329, but the armbian build does not have a driver for them.

sorted, I switched to an older display and all is good (not working or glitched [display on/off randomly] on DELL S3221QS, Dell UltraSharp U2412Mb) though I noticed some glitched behaviour on the old one as well in the console. Indeed the mix was bad and was booting just fine from the multitool sdcard but I was not seeing it. I managed to install to nand via multitool. thanks for the support.

hey @jock, sorry I've been away for looong while. So as per our last discussion I tried to update the uboot and now I have a soft brick (can access uboot, but can't boot). The story: 1) grabbed multitool, wrote via balena and added Armbian_22.11.0-trunk_Xt-q8l-v10_sid_edge_5.19.12_xfce_desktop to images 2) erased nand and flashed the said image 3) I was not sure if the image contained the uboot or not so I dd-ed the uboot from sd to nand: dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=32k seek=1 skip=1 count=40 The status: 1) uboot is 2022.04-armbian 2) booting from multitool(which worked before), mmc1 (sdcard's device id from uboot) I get to "Starting kernel...." screen has no signal, screen turns on, black screen, no image 3) booting from mmc0 (nand's device id from uboot) says it can't configure the voltage and fails, then tries to boot from network. any advice ?

@jock Thanks man, will update the uboot emmc as soon as possible, any hints on how to do this? thanks a lot !

not working for me... I did not have time to debug it since I need the machine up an running. stuck on blue led after power on, no read/write activity

@jock I noticed a 1s where the USBs are powered off after 8s during boot, I suspect it is between first and second stage of the boot process ? I did not had time to add a serial to mine to see what is going on. will continue to debug this when I will have the time. It might be that the usb to sata bridge is powered off and needs a bit of time to initialize. @Sergei Steshenko I think we should find the actual reason if possible and see how we can fix it. Also you can edit the /boot/armbianEnv.txt file and add rootdelay. As a last point: what you suggested adding a rootdelay (Time to delay before attempting to mount the root filesystem) will not fix "repetitive attempts to reset the HDD with squeaking sound" it will just prolong the wait time and will still fail. PS: ~3A the voltage is 5V as normal. Using 4A to power both unit and hdd leaves 1A for the usb to sata bridge and the HDD itself

I used a 5v 2.5A Logitech power adapter (so it should be real 2.5A or close enough). 1) the power for the USB devices go through the power management chip and is 0 while the unit is turned off 2) the voltage dropped in a range of 4.3-4.8v under load meaning even 2.5A is not enough for the unit alone. 3) a ~0.20mA load on the usb dropped the voltage to 4.5v during idle. 4) a ~0.60mA load on the usb dropped the voltage to 4.2v during idle. I will probably power this from an ATX PSU and measure the amps and usb load. When i have the time I will test with an actual hdd.

@Sergei Steshenko - nobody is doubting you. it just looks like a weird power issue. What type of HDD did you use ? 3.5 ? or 2.5 ?

it looks to me like a problem regarding the negotiation of amps over usb. 1) check power consumption of the hdd in a normal pc - or try to see how much is negotiated 2) check what power you get via Q8 or what is negotiated as a last resort splice a usb cable, get the VCC and GND from a proper power supply. PS: might be also a limit in the device tree for the usb(s) - or a limit of the hardware itself @Sergei Steshenko - your power setup is a bit shady...if I have the time and find a working HDD I will try a spliced usb cable with external 5v power. what type of HDD did you use ? 3.5 ? or 2.5 ?

@jock, sorry for the off-topic but: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17857-rk3288-xt-q8l-v10-aka-chiptrip-q8-9-1-001-image/ in case you are interested. http://www.mediafire.com/file/dnddh7vy81goc99/LibreELEC-XT-Q8L-V10.arm-9.1.001-rk3288.img.zip/file

@jockGreat work on the project. I am having a little bit of trouble reversing engineering the uboot configuration so I can get other distros to boot. I did look over the official documentation but I am stuck at this point. Maybe you can lend a hand. What method did you use ? miniloader or spl ? I would say spl since we erased all the memory. How is the params file stored in your setup and how can we modify it. Can you give some insights on how you configured and wrote uboot to the card ? The final target would be to get Libreelec to boot on this.