CM3588 Plus Armbian won't boot. Gave up waiting for root filesystem

[TheHog]

Hello,
I'm new to Armbian and SoC/ARM devices but I've installed Armbian on the device before, however after tinkering around with RKDevTool and installing FriendlyELEC images on it through USB I'm now unable to boot from SD Card. I've done the "EraseAll" procedure under unbricking method https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/CM3588#Windows_Users however it didn't help.

I've tried two SD Cards and I have no idea what else I can do. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything useful on google.

The error is:
"Gave up waiting for root file system device."
"ALERT! UUID=602525b7-ed9f-43f7-91b0-1dc4e67b44bf does not exist. Dropping to a shell!"

When in the initramfs shell I checked blkid and it seems like the SD card is /dev/mmcblk1 PTUUID="8cdc55ae-c576-6f4c-a793-0397a48dccf0".

I'm guessing it should work if I change the armbian UUID or is that assumption incorrect? If so how should I go about it? Also it looks like the UUID Armbian is looking for is static which surprised me... I thought it's something randomly generated by the system. 

I fixed it edit: I booted into debian I got from FriendlyELEC and wrote the Armbian image directly with DD to the SD card and now it works. Before I was writing with Balena Etcher and USB Writer on Windows, tried multiple times, formatted the sd card with diskpart etc., no idea why it didn't work with those but worked with DD, especially since I did it with etcher before and it was ok. I was on a different windows version but I doubt that's the issue?

Edited December 27, 2024 by TheHog
Fixed the issue myself but maybe it'll help someone else?

[Haagent]

Thank God. I had the same problem as you. It seems like the only way is to write the Armbian boot disk from another system. I’ve been struggling with it for a long time and kept getting into BusyBox. I’ll try your method in a bit.

[djurny]

Hi there,

Seems like the kernel is waiting for the wrong filesystem to become available. If blkid shows you PTUUID="8cdc55ae-c576-6f4c-a793-0397a48dccf0 and not any UUID=... associated with a filesystem on that partition, that means that either you do not have a [root] filesystem on that partition or that your root filesystem is on another partition of your SDcard. A PTUUID is the UUID for the partition itself, not for a filesystem. i.e. An empty partition still has a PTUUID. Most (if not all) filesystems have a UUID. Using a UUID makes it easier to have the kernel identify where a/the root filesystem is located. as it is not guaranteed how the storage devices are discovered at boot time. A UUID is linked to the filesystem and not to the device where it is stored on.

 

If you are convinced that you have a root filesystem on a certain partition of your SDcard, you can always use rootdev=/dev/mmcblk1p1 (or wherever your root filesystem lives) in your /boot/armbianEnv.txt to instruct the kernel to expect a root filesystem there. ...but that partition does need to actually have a root filesystem, unless you end up in the same situation you are describing.

 

Can you share the output of sudo parted /dev/mmcblk1 u s pr and sudo blkid -g followed by sudo blkid /dev/mmcblk* ?

 

Groetjes,