MXQ Max 4gb 32gb

[dasargentum]

G'day all this is my first post here, the title describes the brand model, apparent ram size and storage capacity of my tv-box, I know the chip has to be an S905* because I can boot coreelec with the dtb of s905W, but in armbian's case no luck yet. The device doesn't have an sd slot, however I was able to boot coreelec by using a usb drive and ADB. basically adb-connected to it and issued "adb reboot update". I have a similar device as this guy I think if not exactly the same:

 

https://forum.atvxperience.com/viewtopic.php?t=6432

 

So what options do I have? Any help is welcome 😀

[SteeMan]

First you need to read the following TV Box FAQ items:

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

 

Note in particular  from the instructions posted above, that because you have previously run coreelec you will need to find an original android firmware and reinstall that to reset the boot environment to its default state.  coreelec and armbian make incompatible changes to the boot environment and you can't use armbian after coreelec.

 

Otherwise, while I haven't heard of anyone running armbian on this box, given the steps you did to get coreelec running, the same should work for armbian.  The hack of using "adb reboot update" should have the same effect as the toothpick method to set the multiboot uboot environment variables. 

[dasargentum]

Thank you very much for answering. With firmware I assume you mean a ROM for that device? If so, I don't think I can find the exact ROM it uses ; Maybe a ROM for different box with the same cpu could work, but I don't know.

[SteeMan]

Yes a firmware for that device.  It is unlikely that a firmware for a different device will work, even if they share the same cpu.

[dasargentum]

Ok looked into using the "Amlogic USB Burning Tool" but here it say mxq didn't really provide any firmware and probably never will, so I might be out of luck, do you happen to know of any distro I could try or am I stuck with coreelec?

[SteeMan]

I have been playing with this issue for other reasons today.  You should be able to restore the default u-boot environment by the following uboot commands:

env default -a

saveenv

 

Since I doubt you have a serial connection to your box allowing you to debug/monitor u-boot, you can cause these commands to be run by using the attached aml_autoscript file.

 

If you put this file on your usb stick and use the 'adb reboot update' that should run the above commands which are contained in that special aml_autoscript file.  After that you can restore the original armbian aml_autoscript file to your usb stick and do the 'adb reboot update' with that one and then you should have a working armbian environment.

aml_autoscript

[dasargentum]

It worked! I was able to boot armbian, but not actually get to a shell, it gets stuck during boot so I'll try different dtbs, so far I did this. for coreelec I had used gxl_p281_1g.dtb, I thought meson-gxl-s905w-p281.dtb would work fine but you never know

[dasargentum]

@SteeManI finally got to a shell, I downloaded debian's dtb from here and replaced "meson-gxl-s905w-p281.dtb" with the one from debian and surprisingly it worked

[SteeMan]

On 9/28/2022 at 7:01 PM, dasargentum said:

and surprisingly it worked

That isn't surprising really.  The old builds of armbian that are available are for kernel 5.9.0.  While there isn't a lot of fixes being made to the amlogic code in the kernel, there are some that trickle in and the debian link you provided is just from a newer kernel with a more correct dtb.  If someone were to pick up balbes150's work and publish new armbian images with a more recent kernel the armbian images would also likely work better.