broodwich82 Posted September 4, 2018 Posted September 4, 2018 My Cubieboard 2 absolutely refuses to boot from microSD. It will boot into Android from flash when there is no microSD card inserted, but with a card in, it just produces a single red LED and no video output. Eventually it will respond by flashing green and powering down when the power button is depressed, so I feel like it's getting somewhere, but those are the only signs of life. I don't know how to look at serial output from this machine. I've tried two different power supplies, and two different monitors because one had I think been dodgy with this machine before. Same problem on all permutations. I also tested the SD card with F3 and wrote it with Etcher, and I've used it before and it was known good, so I'm 90% confident that the SD card is good. Ideally I would like to install the system to a SATA or USB hard drive, if there's any way I can skip microSD and just do that from the start, that would also work for me. I'm attempting to boot Armbian with the mainline kernel, BTW, not the legacy one.
Jens Bauer Posted September 4, 2018 Posted September 4, 2018 1 hour ago, broodwich82 said: My Cubieboard 2 absolutely refuses to boot from microSD. It will boot into Android from flash. This sounds like that the system on your microSD card is damaged in some way. I have a Cubieboard2 as well and I had to borrow the SD-card for my Espressobin, so I made a backup of the card, then wrote the Espressobin booter, booted the Espressobin and made some installations. When I restored my SD card contents, the Cubieboard2 did not boot from it. Attaching a TFT monitor did not help me either. Here I know for certain that I changed my microSD card is the cause. I very much recommend that you try writing the system to a fresh, unused microSD card (then the chance of getting data-corruption due to wear-out is very small). Note: If your Cubieboard2 was writing logs to your microSD card, this could very likely be a reason that the card is worn out. Spoiler (I have a CS918, which had its NAND worn out by a faulty open-source command-line tool, that wrote 100000 times to the first "sectors" of the NAND and my CS918 was almost useless thereafter! I could write the NAND using the official flash tools under Windows, but the NAND would only retain this for less than an hour if I powered off the box. Now it no longer retains anything - so "wear-out" is both likely and possible). These days, you should be able to get a real good 90MB/sec 16GB card for $6 (or 5.5 Euro).
Jens Bauer Posted September 4, 2018 Posted September 4, 2018 2 hours ago, broodwich82 said: I don't know how to look at serial output from this machine. Found it. You'll need a USB-to-UART adapter, there are plenty of different models on eBay. I very much like CP2102 because there are drivers even for my PowerPC based Macs. -Remember to connect only GND, RxD and TxD. Do not connect VCC. Here's a direct link to the UART debug console page. It also explains the details of the RxD/TxD cross-wiring.
Igor Posted September 4, 2018 Posted September 4, 2018 5 hours ago, broodwich82 said: My Cubieboard 2 absolutely refuses to boot from microSD. Perhaps this is the problem: For serial console check http://linux-sunxi.org/UART
broodwich82 Posted September 11, 2018 Author Posted September 11, 2018 Thanks for the input folks, I'm going to try either a new microSD or the UART adapter or both. I'll try to report back.
broodwich82 Posted November 24, 2018 Author Posted November 24, 2018 (edited) This was the result of the Cubieboard 2 units (I have two) being VERY finicky with HDMI to DVI adapters. If possible, it would be best to use native HDMI with these boards, I think. Edit: Actually, they seem to hate some older LCD panels altogether. If you're having any kind of boot problem with the Cubie 2, try a video connection with no adapters, to the newest/best panel you can find. Edited November 24, 2018 by broodwich82 added something
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