Short and sweet, I got a sweet potato the other day from Amazon. I got it all ready and in a case with active cooling. Plugged it up and all I get on the screen is this…
Scanning for bootflows in all bootdevs
Scanning global bootmeth ‘efi-mgr’ :
Scanning bootdev ‘mmc@74000.bootdev’ :
Card did not respond to voltage select! : -110
Scanning bootdev ‘mmc@72000.bootdev’ :
no more bootdevs
(0 bootflows, 0 valid)
=>
I’ve tried a couple of sandisk cards, i’ve tried multiple power sources, i’ve checked everything I could for any damage, such as the sd card slot. I cannot find any reason why this is doing this and I have not found any other posts that mention anything mine is. I found one google result that matched what it was saying but then they fixed it by using a different power supply.
I’ve also tried the suggested win imager and the raspberry pi imager. Neither result in a boot. All I have are steady red and blue lights. No green light ever comes on that I’ve seen mentioned in other posts. Nothing in the official “hey I cant boot” guide was of any help. Is this thing bricked? I saw before I purchased that Amazon reported a lot of returns. I got a Le Potato before and it worked fine. Wanted another but I got this thing.
I have and am using a Le Potato. I just purchased another Le Potato and Amazon sent me a Sweet Potato. However, boot records are written by the imager or whatever is creating the file systems? Regardless, UEFI would allow me to boot whatever I want. I think the only issue I would run into there would be using a very old OS, but even then, the boot records would be written in such a way as to say here are the files to boot and the parameters to boot with. I don’t think its even seeing the SD card with it only mentioning MMC, which I assume is it looking for an eMMC module and trying to use one that isnt there. As if somehow its locked into just the MMC module as a storage medium. Like it doesn’t even know it has an SD card slot. Beyond this, I have no idea, because I have no idea how to debug one of these to get any other useful information. There doesn’t seem to be any control over the “bios” so I can’t change anything or even verify if it sees an SD card.
However, I happened to order a Pi 5 at the same time as the Potato and found something interesting. I tried the same SD card as I’ve been using with the Potato over and over, like 4 times I rewrote the OS and verified fine. Could not get the thing to boot, so no change. I grabbed the other brand new card that I ordered the same time as the previously used SD card. Wrote a few different OS’s to it and tried them all with the Potato. Nothing. I said screw it and the last OS I wrote to it happened to be Pi OS Lite. I pulled the card and put it right into the Pi 5, boom, boot and the first screen is keyboard selection.
So again, I think its the actual device itself at this point and I also think it fried the first SD card. If a newer and more capable device can load and boot just fine the first try, kind of a no brainer. So with these all showing up on Amazon as low in stock and frequently returned, I haven’t heard from any admins or mods, there is very little helpful info out there…with the return of Pi’s, I think this ends my use of Libre Products. I’ll use the Le Potato until it burns up and I’ll replace it with a Pi. What more can I do really?
Actually, this tellls me you did not fully read my post. I have tried your images even with win32imager. Nothing. As I said, I tried multiple OS’s. Please go back and fully read my post. I even gave you the lines of text it was spitting out. Try again.
Also, I don’t even have it anymore, so technically you can close this and delete my account.
I think there’s a lot of talking past each other in this thread. And I probably contributed to it by not asking clerly if you had tried using the Libre images that are made for EFI booting, rather than the lower-level type of boot the Potato uses. A Potato image would fail to boot in a SweetP because it has no EFI partition, which is all the latter’s on-board boot looks for.
Oh, and at that low level an SD card is an MMC device, but for the physical form. Weird artifact of the history of those things…
Le Potato images have the EFI partition already so they work on Sweet Potato. Sweet Potato would simply use it’s own bootloader in place of the bootloader. The only difference between the images for different boards is whether the bootloader was installed in the area between the MBR sector and first partition. The rest of the image is unified.
My Sweet Potato arrived with a dead SD card slot, so I was never able to boot from that. It sounds as if you might have the same issue.
Instead, I boot from USB, and (now) from eMMC. You can set the boot order as detailed here and here (and note that there’s other useful information in those threads).
There’s no need to abandon Libre Computer over this. RPi boards have their own significant disadvantages. You encountered a problem, and there’s probably a workable solution.
I’ll try to remember that, but never having used La Potato I only knew that it [the SBC] didn’t have a UEFI boot, and that you list the images for La and Sweet separately.
So if the images are interchangeable, why do you confuse new users by having two doing the job of one? I assume that it’s just an artifact of history now?
Hello obd13gee, I am brand new to Libre Computer and the Sweet Potato. I just got mine, and have not booted it, yet. I don’t know my hiney from a hole in the ground, but I do know two things about the Sweet Potato:
The Sweet Potato has a “Boot Switch” (whatever that is)
I read in some other post that the switch should be switched AWAY from the USB ports in order to boot.
Could an incorrect switch setting be preventing you from booting?
The switch controls whether to use the onboard bootloader or a custom one on the eMMC/SD. If you move the switch, you need to make sure you have a proper bootloader on eMMC or SD. Otherwise, it won’t boot at all until you flip the switch back.