Radxa Zero 3E won't boot

[Loshta]

Zero 3E, all images, same UUID/initramfs error on boot.  Tried different flashing methods, sd cards. All the same fail. Board works with the old Joshua riek dist. 

[Werner]

https://paste.armbian.com/hicilanono

 

Works just fine

[Loshta]

My bad I didn't specify. On Windows. I lost 4h on it. I needed to use dd on a Mac to create a bootable SD card. Arbian Imager didn't help, it killed my Window stuck on storage finding and couldn't be killed. on Mac made a bad job of flashing, didn't even started boot.  Btw on Windows, all methods I used (Raspberry Imager, Etcher, Rufus) all made like 50ish small 0 bite partitions and one big unallocated. Somehow it started booting, Armbian logo on, but then it failed.

[Ary]

Same thing is happeing with me at first it booted correctly with armbian imager then suddenly it crashed and after that whenever i tried to flash it using armbian imgaer its giving error of initramfs , btw iam using Radxa zero 3w , any solution or any step iam doing wrong , i have tried it with different imager but same problem.

Edited 18 hours ago by Ary

[eselarm]

If it worked once and now not anymore, it might be the SD-card that is the problem. It might be a as bad that it is a fake SD-card. 

[Ary]

I also thought the same so i was using a sandisk 32 gb sd card so i switched to samsung 64 gb one but same issue in it also, i think the problem is something else.

 

[eselarm]

The other usual thing is then PSU. So also maybe try a different one. Else I cannot really help you, not being able to find rootfs can have pure software cause, but is unlikely if other people can run it successfully. I wish I had bought this SBC a year ago, but I didn't and now they are sold out where I looked, so cannot see If I can reproduce the problem. You need to look in more detail yourself, like connecting serial debug console and setting loglevel to 7 in armbianEnv.txt. Also post which exact image is  (sha256sum), so other people can try the same thing.

[Ary]

Hey, thanks for the PSU suggestion! I actually tested the power theory by stripping all USB accessories (dongles, hubs, keyboard) and running just the board + HDMI, but it still drops to initramfs. I also know the PSU and hardware are 100% good because DietPi boots perfectly on this exact same setup.

I dug around in the initramfs shell and ran blkid. Here is the output: /dev/mmcblk1: PTUUID="[uuid]" PTTYPE="gpt"

The issue: The kernel sees the raw SD card, but it's completely blind to the partitions (p1, p2). It looks like this specific build might be missing the ext4 drivers in the initramfs, which is why it can't find the UUID to mount the rootfs.

For the devs, here is the exact image causing the issue: Armbian_26.2.1_Radxa-zero3_trixie_vendor_6.1.115_minimal.img (Flashed via BalenaEtcher, verified successfully, and ignored all Windows format prompts).

I'm switching over to the official Radxa Debian image for now so I can finally get my onboard AIC8800 Wi-Fi working, but I wanted to drop these debug notes here in case this is a regression in the recent build.