Minix NE0 U1 flash

[rapalax]

Trying to figure out how to initiate toothpick mode in order to flash a minimal iot Armbian image.

 

I found a recovery1 button (accessed from a pinhole) but holding this while powering on, or holding the 'power' button while powering on, doesn't seem to get me anywhere.

 

It seems that whenever I insert my 32G sdcard (maybe not supported?), something happens where the stock android does not boot after the initial MINIX splash screen, but just sits on a black screen (regardless of how I may have powered it on). Initially I thought it was doing something, so I let it run overnight.. I restarted it in the am, but when I removed the SDCard, it just booted back into the original stock androidn.

 

[SteeMan]

What settings have you tried?  dtb, uboot?

[rapalax]

Yes, so copied u-boot-s905x-s912 to u-boot.ext, and the image seemed to already have  fdt /dtb/amlogic/meson-gxl-s905x-p212.dtb  in extlinux.conf which seems to be a good candidate.

What bugs me is that it just goes blank - leading me to suspect its not finding whatever bootstrap script it needs.

 

Something strange is that when I mount the burned the SDCard, I see two partitions: armbi_boot (containing the dtb, uboot, etc)  and armbi_root with an empty /boot dir..  am I supposed to copy stuff to the armbi_root partition under /boot ? amd create a /dtb dir? I otherwise don't see a /boot dir in the armbi_boot partition as described in the amlogic instruction : "In the BOOT partition of the SD card there will be a file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf" ... there is only a /extlinux/extlinux.conf  that I have been playing with.

Edited 2 hours ago by rapalax

[SteeMan]

From what I see online that box has an s905 amlogic CPU

[rapalax]

Wow.. I don't know how that brainfart happened. Used the correct uboot I managed to get somewhere. I tried to use the meson-gxbb-p201 but seems that the FS cannot be found... will try others but wondering if I should be tweaking UUIDs given the errors I am seeing:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Y5GM3a6XUy6SZ6JA6
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Qq3EPGScPUFWfuQP6

 

Seems if I remove the SDCard.. it just boots back to the original Android OS (I don't think that's normal) or indicative of it having installed stuff.

Edited 41 minutes ago by rapalax