pmsac Posted June 1, 2017 Posted June 1, 2017 Hi, I just acquired a couple of OrangePi zero's with the H2+ SoC and 512MB Ram. I tried to install the latest images for both Debian and Ubuntu burning then to microUSB with the regular dd command. The flash USB was a 32GB ebay cheap microUSB generic unbranded. I could not succeed at all in installing any distro, I even tried all the distros on the orangePi website. My strategy is to run the OPi headless, only connected to the ethernet cable, so no display at all. The symptons were always the same once powered (with a 1.2Amp phone charger) the OPi would start the blinking ethernet leds, on my router there was a new IP on the Lan but the green Led would never show up and I could not ever access the OPi with ssh, it simply timed out although it did reply to pings! After much research online I decided to change the microUSB flash for a brand new 16GB one. And voila, this time any Armbian image would boot and give me also ssh access to the OPi. Another thing I've noticed if someone can instruct me on this is that the H2+ is a variant of the H3 and it is a basically a quad core ARM device. Once I make: Quote less /proc/cpuinfo It shows 8 CPU's ?! from 0 to 7 ... What is the reason for this ? Regards.
tkaiser Posted June 1, 2017 Posted June 1, 2017 37 minutes ago, pmsac said: with the regular dd command In other words: you ignored everything Armbian recommends and wasted hours of your life for nothing: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-prepare-a-sd-card
pmsac Posted June 1, 2017 Author Posted June 1, 2017 Hi, In short, yes. That's why I posted and registered in here so that others do not make the same mistake I did and save millions of wasted hours hopefully. Also to my defense I did not test the cards with any testing software because the cards I used have been running on an app I have with FullHD 60P video recording with no problem. So I thought they were acceptable for the OPis ... I was wrong, may this serve's to alert everyone else to the importance of the microSD card issues. About the /proc/cpuinfo ... is there any reason for the SoC to show up 8 CPU's/threads ? Regards. 1
tkaiser Posted June 1, 2017 Posted June 1, 2017 3 minutes ago, pmsac said: That's why I posted and registered in here so that others do not make the same mistake I did and save millions of wasted hours hopefully. To help with this what about getting Etcher as recommended and try to flash the Armbian image with Etcher on your '32GB ebay cheap microUSB generic unbranded' card and report results here now? Wrt cpuinfo: How does the output of 'sudo armbianmonitor -u' looks like?
pmsac Posted June 1, 2017 Author Posted June 1, 2017 Hi, The log uploaded to : http://sprunge.us/gWgD 4 Cores ... Somehow now I can not see the previous 8 cores on /proc/cpuinfo ! Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) processor : 0 BogoMIPS : 2400.00 processor : 1 BogoMIPS : 2400.00 processor : 2 BogoMIPS : 2400.00 processor : 3 BogoMIPS : 2400.00 Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xc07 CPU revision : 5 Hardware : sun8i Revision : 0000 Serial : 2400786743203c1c074e Strange to say the least ... I can not figure out what happened on the previous list of the /proc/cpuinfo. maybe it was one of the many failed attempts to boot. Forget about it. Now everything is ok. About the microSD's I will try and use other type, I will not use those 32GB on any OPi anymore. Regards.
tkaiser Posted June 1, 2017 Posted June 1, 2017 23 minutes ago, pmsac said: About the microSD's I will try and use other type, I will not use those 32GB on any OPi anymore. No, please try exactly that failing 32 GB SD card with Etcher and report back. It's not about OPi (or those boards being picky) at all. Simply give it a try to write an OS image to this card with an appropriate tool like Etcher and report back
pmsac Posted June 2, 2017 Author Posted June 2, 2017 Hi, Sadly that is not going to be possible. I can not test the microSD's anymore since sadly I can not even create a filesystem on those microSD's ... Yesterday I used fdisk to erase the filesystems on the drive and then made a new very simple ext3 just for testing. I used the mkfs.ext -c option to test and see if there was bad blocks. There was no report of any problems. Today I was trying to actually mount the filesystem and ... it simply can not. I truly thing the microSD's are dead. The error is something like mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error I've tried everything to heck but quite frankly I ca not expect much from a article advertised as "32GB cheap microUSB generic ..." This time I simply have to get rid of the microSD's ... and use Proper tested compliant ones. I simply can not waste more time on those. Thanks a lot for all the heads up in the forum and let this one be a warning for everyone else. Regards
tkaiser Posted June 2, 2017 Posted June 2, 2017 44 minutes ago, pmsac said: Sadly that is not going to be possible. I can not test the microSD's anymore since sadly I can not even create a filesystem on those microSD's ... Well, the whole purpose of asking you again and again to try it with Etcher is... since Etcher would've told you in no time that you're dealing with a crappy card here.
pmsac Posted June 2, 2017 Author Posted June 2, 2017 Oh I know ... simply Etcher can not even start to test and write any image onto the flash because it simply can not mount ... I know they are truly dead. And it could be all the time they spent being used on video recording. I've used them on one of those HDMI capture devices ... the device was always Super hot. But truly it would have been the correct thing to do before I started the install, now sadly it is too late. And Thanks for the wonderful work the Armbian team have been doing. I truly think these little boards have a great great future.
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