Odroid HC2 not booting with several releases.

[MadOp]

Hi, hope you're all doing well.

I have this Odroid HC2 (XU4 without video output) that was running an old Armbian version. I intended to update to the latest one (o something close to it) but it seems it won't boot with the newer releases.

 

The board seems to power up ok, leds apparently blinking in a normal fashion, but it seems it gets stuck somewhere. It doesn't acquire any IP address.

 

Not having video output leaves me with little to no way of knowing what is failing.

No logs seem to be created in the sdcard.

 

I also tried DietPi images, which I believe are based on Armbian but the same thing happens.

 

I does, however, boot the previous Armbian installation and an Ubuntu image I got from somewhere (but it's a desktop version which doesn't seem to include remote ssh access by default).

 

So my guess is that I can mostly rule hardware or sdcard issues.

 

I created "armbianEnv.txt" to include "board_name=hc2 # or xu4, xu3, hc1, hc2"

 

boot.ini didn't show anything suspicious and the UUID in there matches the one of the sdcard I'm using.

 

These are all the images I tried (with Etcher) (in no specific order) :

- Armbian_25.2.1_Odroidxu4_bookworm_current_6.6.75_minimal.img

- Armbian_25.2.1_Odroidxu4_ubuntu_noble_current_6.6.75_minimal.img

- Armbian_24.8.1_Odroidxu4_bookworm_current_6.6.47_minimal.img

 

- DietPi_2025-02-17_OdroidXU4-ARMv7-Bookworm.img

- DietPi_2025-02-17_OdroidXU4-ARMv7-Bullseye.img

- DietPi_2025-02-17_OdroidXU4-ARMv7-Trixie.img

 

This is the only new image that did boot: 

- ubuntu-24.04-6.6-minimal-odroid-xu4-20240911.img

 

 

Any ideas about what could be happening?

 

Also, I couldn't find an older image to try out, i.e. something with a 5.X kernel, is there anywhere I could get one? 

 

Thanks in advance.

MO

 

Edited February 18 by MadOp

[Werner]

A fix was recently implemented to avoid kernel panic. Try building an image by yourself or use automated images from github.com/armbian/os or github.com/armbian/community

[MadOp]

Thanks for the reply Werner.

 

Unfortunately I haven't been able to get it to boot yet. I tried these two images from one of the sources you mentioned:

Armbian_25.5.0-trunk.77_Odroidxu4_noble_current_6.6.75_minimal.img

Armbian_25.5.0-trunk.77_Odroidxu4_trixie_current_6.6.75_minimal.img

 

It still doesn't show up in the DHCP, so it seems it still hangs early in the boot process.

[Igor]

Test for latest stable image (Armbian_25.2.1_Odroidxu4_bookworm_current_6.6.75_minimal.img.xz)

1. https://dl.armbian.com/odroidxu4/Bookworm_current_minimal

2. Boot logs on HC1 https://paste.next.armbian.com/kupugotasi

 

No issues whatsoever. Check PSU, cables, use different SD card, ...