Install on amlogic tv box without working emmc

[Игорь Шаповалов]

Hello everyone, I have three Amlogic S905x TV boxes with a dead EMMC, and one with a desoldered EMMC (since I thought without it, they would boot from the microSD card). Is there a way to force them to boot into Armbian? Holding the power button doesn't work, and desoldering the EMMC didn't help either.

I was able to boot Armbian using UART. A workaround is to use Ardruino, which sends commands to boot Armbian after a while, but that's a workaround, and I'd like a more elegant solution.

1) Download the *.img.gz image for the amlogic_s905x

2) Write the image to the microSD card using Rufus.

3) Connect the UART. Steps 2-6 in the brick instructions.

4) Insert the microSD card with Armbian into the console.

5) Turn on the console, close the testpoint, and at a certain point, the UART boot log will stop at gxl_p212_v1#.

6) Execute the following commands:

 

mmc dev 1
env default -a -f;save
setenv preboot 'if fatload mmc 0 1020000 aml_autoscript; then autoscr 1020000; fi; if fatload usb 0 1020000 aml_autoscript; then autoscr 1020000; fi; if fatload mmc 1 1020000 emmc_autoscript; then autoscr 1020000; fi;'
save
reboot

 

 

Is there a simpler way to boot from a microSD card to default settings? Maybe I need to cleverly write a bootloader to it?

[SteeMan]

No standard way to do what you want.  The Armbian images from this site depend on the original android bootloader on the emmc to boot.  Since you don't have working emmd these images wont boot.

Theoritically if you found a working boot loader for your box and it was put on the SD card, then you would have more options.

[hexdump]

you might try to write (after gunzip) this u-boot boot-amlogic_gxl_a95x-r2-atf-aarch64.dd.gz from https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/tag/250629-01 which i built some time ago via "dd if=boot-amlogic_gxl_a95x-r2-atf-aarch64.dd of=/dev/your-sd-card bs=512 seek=1 skip=1" to the sd-card to which you wrote the armbian image before and see if it boots (never tested it with armbian) - build instructions for that u-boot are here: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/blob/wip-v2025-04/readme.gxl ... alternatively you might try to boot this (non armbian) image to see if that u-boot works at all on your device: https://github.com/velvet-os/imagebuilder-testimages/releases/download/autumn-release-2025-testimages/aarch64_mbr_uefi-aarch64-trixie-251016.img.gz (please keep in mind that anything around that image is not related to armbian and thus should not be discussed here as i do not want to hijack this armbian thread)

 

@SteeMan - in case you are interested in getting some of this into armbian, maybe have a look at it and i can try to answer potential questions around it - this was just some experiment to boot amlogic via the u-boot uefi implementation and grub  which worked out quite well - as a result an amlogic tv box feels a bit like a pc with a normal grub boot on the screen  ... should be possible to make that work for many of the supported amlogic socs - i simply do not have the time to look further into this right now ...

Edited 2 hours ago by hexdump

[SteeMan]

4 minutes ago, hexdump said:

in case you are interested

I always appreciate the work you do.  I'll try to experiment with what you have done.  It sounds very interesting, but I probably won't have time until next month though to look at it.

[hexdump]

@SteeMan - there is no pressure to do it quickly or at all ... if you should look at it and have questions, just ask me here (i'm reading here regularly, but sometimes with a few days delay) or create an issue in my github repo. i'm always happy to see that you are keeping the amlogic boxes stuff alive pretty well in armbian.