No Armbian images are working

[Shtopor]

Good day!

 

I have a Banana pi m2s with Amlogic A311D, 4GB RAM and 16GB emmc.

Official images from Banana pi work on this device (both emmc and SD card).

The problem is when I try to install Armbian on SD card - using BalenaEtcher on Windows / Disk tool on Ubuntu Mate:

- the m2s either doesn't boot (when Armbian is written on emmc memory)

- or m2s boots from emmc storage (when Armbian is written on SD Card)

 

SD card has boot priority over emmc and works fine with official .img from bananapi.

 

I see all written files on SD card after using Balena Etcher. The difference from official images is that boot folder in official images is seperate FAT32 partition. And in Armbian there is no seperate boot partition. But as I understood from reading forums, that shouldn't be a problem.

 

Strange that is doesn't want to boot Armbian (no information on screen and blue led is not blinking). I tried different images from older ones to newer, with and without desktop... No result.

Also tried changing armbianEnv.txt in part of .dtb to use. For example .dtb of odroid n2l, that generally may work (tested in official banana pi images) - but still Armbian doesn't start.

 

Please help.

 

Thank you!

Edited July 20 by Shtopor

[c0rnelius]

I suspect the issue is the version of U-Boot currently on the eMMC. When the board boots, if U-Boot is found on the eMMC, that is what will be used to do the initial boot. If an SDCARD is detected with a viable OS, it will then attempt to load it. It may be that the version of U-Boot "BSP?" on the eMMC is not compatible with Armbian and needs to be dd'd off.

 

I just flashed this to SD to test. Came up fine.

 ____  ____  _   __  __ ____  ____  
| __ )|  _ \(_) |  \/  |___ \/ ___| 
|  _ \| |_) | | | |\/| | __) \___ \ 
| |_) |  __/| | | |  | |/ __/ ___) |
|____/|_|   |_| |_|  |_|_____|____/ 
                                    
Welcome to Armbian 24.5.3 Bookworm with Linux 6.6.36-current-meson64

System load:   10%           	Up time:       1 min	
Memory usage:  4% of 3.69G  	IP:	       
CPU temp:      37°C           	Usage of /:    4% of 29G    	

[ Menu-driven system configuration (beta): sudo apt update && sudo apt install armbian-config ]

 

 

[Shtopor]

Thank you, that worked!

 

Booted from SD card with bananapi original image, then used:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M count=1

 

To clean emmc.

And with the help of Ubuntu Mate disk imager (I believe that dd function can be used as well) - I wrote Armbian on emmc and now it works totally fine.

 

As a result m2s always boots from emmc with Armbian ignoring SD card with official images, that is ok.

[c0rnelius]

> As a result m2s always boots from emmc with Armbian ignoring SD card with official images, that is ok.

 

This is probably a result of the binary being used to boot from the SD card, which is the default bin flashed to the IMGs.

 

u-boot.bin: eMMC
u-boot.bin.sd.bin: SD

 

In practice the u-boot.bin should be flashed to eMMC and u-boot.bin.sd.bin flashed to SD. Otherwise it will screw up the boot order.

But that is neither here nor there. You got it working and that's what matters.

[Shtopor]

Thank you, that makes sense. I'm happy that Armbian images works for m2s, because original banana pi m2s images are super limited (most of wifi adapters not working, as well as touch screen, sound etc.). Plus there are errors/bugs in bananapi official images, that are not updated for a long time.

Armbian has improved significantly during recent years, a lot of things work out of the box. And I was surprised how stable it is.

Edited July 22 by Shtopor