Need Help with Tigre 2 TV Box Amlogic S905X: Bricked After Installing Armbian

[calusbr]

Hello everyone,

 

I recently acquired a Tigre 2 TV Box with the following hardware specifications: Amlogic S905X processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB NAND storage (SkHynix). I attempted to install the Armbian operating system, and the installation process started from a USB drive. Unfortunately, after the installation, the device seems to be bricked as it doesn't boot up (led red).

 

I've read that it might be possible to recover a bricked device by putting it into MaskROM mode through a process involving a short circuit. However, I'm not entirely sure how to do this, and I'm hoping someone here can provide guidance or steps on how to put my Tigre 2 TV Box into MaskROM mode.

 

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

 

[Jens J.]

How did you "install"? via armbian-config install (not for armbian tv boxes) or /root/install-aml.sh (specially made for board type "aml-s9xx-box") ?

Did you try booting off of the armbian sd card again (holding the reset button for 7 seconds while powering up)?

 

First thing to do when you think you might have "bricked" a board is to get serial console access on it so you can see what's actually going on, e.g. using a usb uart adapter connected to the serial port header (the four unpopulated pins, specifically: TX, RX, GND). With amlogic and the way armbian installs, the stock amlogic uboot is likely still there, and something else can be loaded from it (via usb, sd, etc).

 

Edited October 23, 2023 by Jens J.

[calusbr]

@Jens J.  Thanks for your feedback! I installed it using the armbian-install command and unfortunately I ended up bricking the device. After a lot of research I discovered how to unbrick the device, connect the T9 point to the device's GND for a few seconds and it will return to MASKROM mode.

 

After that, I installed the Android Stock version again and booted the pendrive with the Armbian installation, this time I used the command /root/aml-install.sh, but it did not recognize my NAND storage unit. I would like to know if there is any way to install Armbian on a board with NAND? After reading some forum posts, I was informed that Armbian no longer supports NAND, only the lag version with Kernel 3.4.x

 

Every help is welcome! Thanks

[Jens J.]

correct, unfortunately, some tvbox manufacturers have opted to use cheaper nand flash, rather than emmc-compatible flash, which is supported. Using nand flash directly requires additional support in the bootloader and kernel, which do not currently exist. (There has been _some_ work in the kernel on this, but it's nowhere near finished.)
TLDR, you only be able to install to internal flash if it's eMMC.

[calusbr]

Hello @Jens J.

 

I found a solution to be able to run Armbian on this device.

At my institution we are converting these TV Boxes into computers to make available in public schools. So I have 40 units from this same box and this unit was the only one with NAND memory.

So I managed to install Armbian on the other units and after carrying out all the customization I created a DD image of the EMMC unit /dev/mmcblk1.

 

(Note: check if your partition is /dev/mmcblk1 or /dev/mmcblk2)

 

Create a compressed disk image:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 status=progress | gzip -9 /mnt/external/filename.img.gz

 

Then I cloned the NAND unit and, oddly enough, it was uploaded to the Armbian system.

zcat /mnt/external/filename.img.gz | dd of=/dev/mmcblk1

 

It appears that when cloning information from an EMMC partition to NAND the u-boot process occurs normally without analyzing the hardware context.

So if anyone has the same problem, if you can get another unit with EMMC memory, it may be possible to convert it to a NAND unit.

[Jens J.]

afaik, if your box had /dev/mmcblk1, assuming that's the internal storage (and not the sd card), then I believe it means your unit has emmc, not just raw nand.

 

this has a nice explanation of emmc vs nand - TLDR: emmc has mmc controller on top of raw nand storage, making it easier to present the storage to the OS/kernel. With only raw nand, the kernel has to have the drivers in-tree to understand how to talk to the nand chip and handle all of the concerns to present it as a block device.

https://www.toradex.com/blog/what-you-should-know-about-flash-storage

 

regardless, glad you got it sorted out