Problems with recent images

[baryon]

Hello!

 

I recently ran updates on the old M2S I won from here, and that appeared to break my OS, so I went back to try reinstall. And that's where I hit a snag. For some reason, after booting, the kernels refuse to see the partitions on the SD card. /dev/mmcblk0 exists, but none of the subpartitions, and so the boot process cannot find the partition it's supposed to boot from.

 

Neither

Armbian_25.5.1_Bananapim2s_trixie_current_6.12.32_minimal.img.xz

nor

Armbian_26.2.1_Bananapim2s_trixie_current_6.18.15_minimal.img.xz

get me past this issue.

 

I've tried changing the power supply, debug with LLMs, but nothing appears to be working. Any suggestions?

Edited 13 hours ago by baryon

[eselarm]

If 2 images don't work, I start thinking that the images are OK, but something goes wrong after extracting/decompressing, writing to SD-card, and reading at power by the bootROM/maskROM and U-Boot.

 

I have various images downloaded and checked the past months, only for topics like this and I remember only 1 being wrong (there was no rootfs, only bootloader). I do not have a BPI-M2S, so cannot really test on hardware. And hardware might be the issue. Quite often nowadays it is fake or counterfeit SD-card. Those should work OK for writing the image and even verifying, but after that all sorts of strange errors and corruption can happen.

 

It might be something with MBR or GPT failing, but this is rare. You simply need to check much more, check the SD-card in other Linux computer with fdisk etc. And connect serial console cable, so you can seen U-Boot and kernel logs and also interrupt U-Boot and do manual scan commands.

 

Ultimately, you might need to build an image yourself and use Btrfs instead of Ext4. Might also make U-Boot understand Btrfs. Then any block-level corruption will be detected as Btrfs has checksums on all storage blocks. I use it for more than a decade and it really helps catching issues, even after years the same Btrfs root filesystem. And bad SD-cards are easily detected. Note that there is also btrfs-convert, allows converting existing images or SD-cards, but is a bit tricky as you need to do a few other things w.r.t. bootloader.

Edited 1 hour ago by eselarm