Renegade Booting with Bad SD Card, But Not Good One?

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1

I’m trying to boot Ubuntu Desktop on a Renegade. I can successfully boot every time off an old Kingston 8GB SD Card with a write speed of a meager 5 MB/s. The performance is pitiful, of course. I was only using the Kingston as a proof of concept, and immediately went to upgrade to a recommended card. I purchased a SanDisk 32 GB SD Card with a maximum write speed of 120 MB/s (in practice, my rig seems to max out at about 50 MB/s) and flashed the same image to it, but the board never boots. It doesn’t even get to the “heartbeat” stage. When I switch it for the old Kingston, it boots up without issue.

I’m at a loss as to why this may be. The SanDisk card looks to be in excellent condition and it works perfectly otherwise. I figured I’d ask and see if perhaps I’m missing something obvious before returning the SanDisk or buying another card.

2

We have discovered software boot inconsistency issues with Renegade, we are looking into it.

3

My experience with the renegade that I just received from amazon: I tried the Ubuntu, bullseye and buster images and always get the same behavior. The board will boot normally the first time only and when I do shutdown -r now it will just shut down. Upon reapplying power, the lights stay solid and nothing else happens. It is headless so this is all I see. Armbian works as it should.

4

I was having a similar issue with “Le Potato”, as well as the device will not reboot if I am using the OTG port. While attempting to triage the latter issue, I tried “apt install watchdog” after reading How to Shutdown Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC Le Potato and https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/watchdog/watchdog-api.txt. When nothing is connected to the OTG port the system now reboots as expected. You may want to give it a try.