rock-5b-plus not botting after MTD flash and set as boot option

[Fabricio Martínez Tamayo]

Downloaded Debian 13 (Trixie)Minimal / IOT kernel 6.18 onto SD and had it working 24/7 for about 2-3 days with no problems.

 

I selected the option to copy the content of the SD card to an NVME, updated the MTD flash and set it as first boot option and now the device wont boot from nvme, SD or USB.

 

How can I recover the unit?

 

Edited 14 hours ago by Fabricio Martínez Tamayo

[Werner]

booting from sd should work even with proper mtd in place. Get usb uart adapter and provide boot logs.

[Fabricio Martínez Tamayo]

Well don't know exactly how the board got bricked, but I would guess the armbian-config did not flash the SPI right and somehow my SD card got screwed too. armbian-install did it right.

 

I was able to get it back by using the rkdeveloptool tool from my mac mini.

 

For whoever runs into this problem this is what I had to do:

 

Get a usb-c cable connected to the "DP Display Port" and connect to another machine to troubleshoot, disconnect the power source before you do this. Before you connect the cable, press the Maskrom button.

 

This should allow you to access the SPI from your troubleshooting machine. I played around with the windows tool RKDevTool with no luck. I ended up compiling rkdeveloptool in my mac mini m4 and this one did work.

 

Anywho, once you have the board hooked up and in Maskrom mode, you need to get your hands on the SPI Loader *.bin. It's somewhere in the resources page of radxa. The one I used is rk3588_spl_loader_v1.15.113.bin. After this you flash the board with the following commands:

 

The following command should show you the board info and confirm it's connected in Maskrom mode.

./rkdeveloptool ld

./rkdeveloptool db rk3588_spl_loader_v1.15.113.bin
./rkdeveloptool ef                           
./rkdeveloptool rd

 

This allowed me to boot aging from SD, even though I had to reflash the SD because somehow it also went bad. Not sure if it was because of all the testing or armbian-config screwed it up. 

 

After all this, I was booting again, and I did an armbian-install to move again the content of the SD to the nvme. I again, did an install/update MTD flash and boot from MTD first and this time around it all worked. I'm able to boot from SD first and if not SD is present it boots from NVME.