Diagnosing failure to boot in Cubieboard 2

[broodwich82]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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