Sweet Potato not booting and no video

I just purchased a Sweet Potato from the storefront and received it a few days ago. I flashed a Sandisk 256GB with DD using the debian-12-base-arm64+aml-s905x-cc.img and at first it would give me a red light, steady blue light and a steady yellow light and nothing after a long time; no video either. I reflashed it several times and I think after the fourth time it booted and I finally got video (regrettably didn’t pay attention to the lights) and got the login prompt. I let it sit for a few hours and I unplugged it to move it to where I was going to permanently place it. Using the same power adapter (Anker 100w with an Apple USB-C to USB-C cord) but a different HDMI source, I plugged it in and got the steady red, blue, and yellow with no video again. After waiting a good 10 minutes and seeing the LEDs on my USB keyboard were not lit up, I unplugged it, waited about 30 seconds, and replugged it in. Still nothing; just a steady red, blue, and yellow lights and no video. I reflashed the SD card with DD and same thing.

I went to my Mac and used BelenaEtcher and the same img file and still got the same thing. When attached to my Linux machine, the SD shows a name of root and files and folders on it. Mac can’t read it worth a flip but Disk Utility shows 2 partitions, disk6s1 and disk6s2, with s1 being blue and a size 267.4MB and s2 red and a size of 2.15GB.

I am at a loss. As I said I only got it to boot once and I think it was just luck. Warning: I know enough about Linux to be dangerous: still learning. I do have a windows VM on the Mac, but haven’t looked at the SD on that. Any suggestions?

Sweet Potato has an onboard bootloader that should display the boot screen without any software loaded. Make sure the boot switch is in the SPI NOR position: Where can I find information about how to use the boot switch on the Sweet Potato?

You should use the +arm64 image since this is not the V1 which doesn’t have the onboard bootloader. If you have the switch in the wrong position (MMC) and you’re using the V1 image, it will try to use the V1 bootloader on the V2.