Problems with boot (OrangePi Lite)

[zaza]

I am experiencing serious problems with booting Armbian on OrangePi Lite.

 

I flashed SD card with a fresh image of Armbian_5.20_Orangepilite_Debian_jessie_3.4.112_desktop.img

At the first boot it always freezes right after this line:

 

    Started WPA supplicant.

 

It stays there forever and I have no choice but power off the system.

 

At each subsequent boot the system freezes very frequently but at different lines so again I need to reset it.

However sometimes it succeeds at the second boot and I am able to login as root and then create new user and enter the desktop after that.

 

I was very happy that it finally started and everything was working fine (including WiFi).

Unfortunately after shutting down Armbian was not able to start again - after apparently successful boot when it was time to launch the Xwindow desktop the screen stayed completely black (at one of the tries there was even a mouse cursor at the middle but unable to move).

 

I have gone through all this process 10+ times with flashing a fresh image and result is always the same.

 

I'm aware that similar problems might be caused by crappy SD card or faulty power unit but I'm absolutely sure that it is not the case.

 

I have tried this with 3 different SD cards Samsung 16 GB  EVO HS-1.

I have quality PSU giving stable 5.25 V at 2.5 A.

 

Moreover I also tried at least 5 different images (based on Debian and Slackware) provided by loboris.

All of them are working just fine and stable. They are able to boot at the first and every time and they are working perfectly (except that none of them supports WiFi drivers for OrangePI Lite).

 

Obviously it is not a hardware issue either.

 

In my opinion the problem is definitely in Armbian.

 

Has anyone experienced such problems?

Can you help please

[tkaiser]

In my opinion the problem is definitely in Armbian.

 

Loboris' stuff and Armbian differs in two areas:

• different u-boot (we rely on mainline u-boot, loboris used Allwinner's outdated u-boot 2011.09)
• different so called dvfs settings (dynamic voltage frequency scaling)

In case you followed our guide (ensure that download is not corrupted, check SD card for integrity issues, verify burn to SD card) then it would be worth a try to see whether your board is sensible for undervoltage situations. This requires using a different OS image, having Armbian on SD card and then mounting the Armbian image with this other Linux.

[arox]

The first thing I would test is : not load wifi driver or start wpa_supplicant at boot ...

[zaza]

I found the issue.

 

I turned out to be faulty image download.

I downloaded the image from the Armbian website again and it worked.

Now it boots normally first and every time.

 

Thanks for the assistance