noble server and xfce fail to start up properly on RPi5

[Janos Szigetvari]

Hello!

 

I have an RPi5 8GB board that I bought off of AliExpress, along with a Waveshare PoE M.2 HAT+ ( https://www.waveshare.com/poe-m.2-hat-plus-b.htm )

Initially I tried to use the Noble XFCE image, by following the recommended installation procedure via rpi-imager via a USB drive, hoping to install the system to a Toshiba (Kioxia) NVMe drive.

The RPI5 was connected to a CrowView Note.

 

What I saw was that the firmware loaded up the necessary files from the USB drive (then later the micro-SD card), and the initramfs loaded up too, then systemd started up, and probably when the screen usually goes blank for a short time (probably switching to KMS), here, the signal completely drops, and apparently nothing happens.

(The messages scroll too fast, and then disappear, and I can't make out anything from the screen content.)

I tried looking on the network to see whether the RPi5 comes up at all, but no.

Since then, I tried to eliminate elements from my setup to see whether that makes any difference:

• I removed the Waveshare HAT
• Swtiched to using a micro-SD card instead of the USB thumb drive
• Tried to boot it without the CrowView Note
• Tried using the Noble Server image to eliminate any possible problems with the graphical UI 

but none of these helped.

I now have the bare RPi5 with an active heatsink, and it's still not booting properly.

What should I try? Should I try to get serial console working so that I at least see the boot messages?

Is there an activity LED on the RPI5 where I could at least configure a heartbeat so that I could check whether the OS is alive at all?

 

Since the OS can't be installed, I can't really submit much diagnostic information.

[Janos Szigetvari]

All the while the Raspberry PI OS (version September 2025) has booted out of the box on the board itself.

I will check it with with the HAT added too.

[Janos Szigetvari]

I can report back that the above mentioned HAT works well well with the Kioxia SSD I have.

So this problem very likely has something to do with armbian, and is not hardware related.

[Janos Szigetvari]

The Trixie-based XFCE image seems to work fine too, so only the Noble-based images seem to be broken.

[Janos Szigetvari]

Any comments on this would be welcome.

[laibsch]

Providing logs with 

armbianmonitor -u

 helps with troubleshooting and significantly raises chances that issue gets addressed.

[Janos Szigetvari]

@laibsch Thanks for the suggestion, but I wasn't able to actually get a login prompt, or start up a shell as a result of this problem. (No UI or virtual console was visible or accessible.)

[laibsch]

Then it is time to follow http://debug.armbian.de

[Janos Szigetvari]

@laibsch Hmmm, the current latest image seems to work OK.
On the other hand, I tried to get the serial console working, but I did not manage to do so.

I used an FTDI-based cable ( https://ftdichip.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/DS_TTL-232R_RPi.pdf ) with the recommended connection diagram, but nothing ever showed up on minicom's output. (It always showed it as Offline, and not even a single byte came through)
I tried 9600 and 115200 baud for minicom, and also set `dtoverlay=uart0` in config.txt at some point. But neither helped in any way.

[c0rnelius]

The /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt requires: console=serial0,115200 

The /boot/firmware/config.txt requires: enable_uart=1

 

That's it.