Orange PI PC+ eMMC wont boot

[Stephen Remde]

Hi Guys,

 

I installed armbian on an SD Card and the installed it to the eMMC. Which all worked fine. 

 

After a bit of tinkering, it would no longer boot (no ssh access) and when I insert the original sd card now it wont boot from that either.

 

I think I read that the it won't boot from the sd card if there is a valid boot record on the eMMC, so what can I do now?

 

Thanks

[Jimmy Belanger]

when you insert the sdcard, boot on the emmc or sdcard ?

 

fdisk -l please

[Stephen Remde]

I can't boot in to either the emmc or sdcard - I will try a clean installation of armbian on an sdcard tonight, but my understanding is that it will not boot off the sdcard if there is a valid boot image in the emmc?

[Pieter]

 my understanding is that it will not boot off the sdcard if there is a valid boot image in the emmc?

From what I understood is that it is the other way around.

When there is an sdcard inserted, it will boot from that and not from the emmc.

[martinayotte]

Yes, this is true for all Soc from AllWinner.

[jernej]

Yes, but only if there is BROM signature. If there is not, it should ignore that device.

[tkaiser]

Yes, but only if there is BROM signature. If there is not, it should ignore that device.

 

Exactly

 

And (not so) surprisingly the process to get rid off this BROM signature is mentioned in Armbian's documentation: http://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-install-to-emmc-nand-sata-usb

[Stephen Remde]

That seems to imply nand-sata-install does not remove the BROM signature from the SDCARD?

 

I did not do it manually - so I wonder why it is not booting from the SDCARD.

[tkaiser]

That seems to imply nand-sata-install does not remove the BROM signature from the SDCARD?

 

Of course not since how should a little tool know what you're thinking? Maybe you tweaked Armbian to the max and want to roll it out on 10 OPi PC Plus using a single SD card and 10 times nand-sata-install?

 

I did not do it manually - so I wonder why it is not booting from the SDCARD.

 

 

Who should know that? All we know for sure is that boot and normal troubles are in 95 percent of times caused by SD cards and power supplies. These pieces of hardware always start to fail sometimes in the future and without a serial console it's absolutely impossible to diagnose boot problems anyway

[Stephen Remde]

Thanks for the pointer to the serial. I hooked up a USB to TTL which worked great. It was complaining about a bad CRC or and falling back to net boot. Anyway reinstalled to the emmc and all good now.