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.