X96Air S905X3 - Any known emmc bricking issues?

[ant_thomas]

I was running armbian on emmc on an X96Air 4GB/64GB 1GBit S905X3 box a while ago and then after a power down it bricked.

No boot screen, no android (obviously) - it sent a HDMI signal, but nothing.

 

Managed to recover it and get Android flashed on it again then Armbian again on SD then emmc.

Just done "apt upgrade" to get things up to date. All went well, then a reboot, and..... bricked again.

 

Nothing obvious, no issues.

 

I'll go through the process again - Android -> armbian sd -> armbian emmc 

But is there a known issue with any boxes that just brick themselves?

Any ways to avoid it?

 

This box is particularly useful because of the USB3 port with Gbit ethernet and I want to make use of it.

Previously when I'd been testing it it had been rock solid for a few months with good uptime and no issues - until the brick.

[SteeMan]

I see similar issues with some s905x2 and some s905c3 boxes I have.  I've never dug into the issue to see what is happening, but the workaround that works for my cases is that when the boot from emmc fails, I boot from an SD card (I have an SD card ready just for this).  Then reboot from emmc, and then it usually will boot.  For some reason a successful boot from SD clears up something that then allows the emmc to boot properly.  This is what works for me, don't know if your situation is the same or different but you can try.