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Announcements
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1. Check power supply, check SD card and check other people experiences
Power supply issues are one of the three biggest issues you'll face when starting with Single Board Computers (SBCs). SD card issues, whether fake or faulty, are another and issues resulting from poor board design is the other common issues you can encounter. Power supply issues can be tricky. You might have a noisy power supply that works with one board because it has extra filtering, but won't work with another. Or you're using that cheap phone charger because your board has a microUSB connector, and it is either erratic, or doesn't start up, or even becomes the cause of some SD card issues. Some tips to avoid the most common causes of problems reported: Don't power via micro USB - unless you have optimised your setup for low power requirements. Micro USB is great for mobile phones because they are simply charging a battery. It's bad for SBCs. Yes, it does work for a lot of people, but it also causes more problems and headaches over time than it is worth, unless you know exactly what you are doing. If you have a barrel jack power connector on your SBC, use it instead! If there is an option for powering via header connections, use that option!
Don't use mobile phone chargers. They might be convenient and cheap, but this is because they are meant for charging phones, not powering your SBC which has particular power requirements.
When you are evaluating a power supply, make sure you run some stress tests on your system to ensure that it will not cause issues down the path. (Micro) SD card issues can be sneaky. They might appear right at the start causing strange boot and login errors, or they might cause problems over time. It is best to run a test on any new SD card you use, to ensure that it really is what it is, and to ensure that isn't faulty. Armbian provides you a simple way to do this -- armbianmonitor -c /path/to/device/to/test -
2. Make sure to collect and provide all necessary information
We can only help if you provide quality information for us to work with. All stable images from the download section are tested, most stable upgrades are tested and we have tens of thousands of users. Even with regular and extensive testings, bugs sometimes do slip through. This is a voluntary support service and is unrelated to board makers, and is not obligated to provide you any answers. Repeated asking the same questions because you're not happy with the answers will result in you being ignored.
Before you post a question, use the forum search as someone else might have already had the same problem and resolved it. And make sure you've read the Armbian documentation. If you still haven't found an answer, make sure you include the following in your post: 1. Logs when you can boot the board: armbianmonitor -u (paste URL to your forum post) 2. If your board does not boot, provide a log from serial console or at least make a picture, where it stops. 3. Describe the problem the best you can and provide all necessary info that we can reproduce the problem. We are not clairvoyant or mind readers. Please describe your setup as best as possible so we know what your operating environment is like. We will not help in cases you are not using stable official Armbian builds, you have a problem with 3rd party hardware or reported problem would not be able to reproduced.
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