Can you sudo apt update and sudo apt dist-upgrade and try?
I’m not sure what is going on then… with my S905X-CC, it will get stuck in a boot loop when a USB is plugged in… I assumed that was a search for some kind of USB boot? If I knew how to stop that it would be great, as it would enable us to do a remote reboot while leaving USB drives plugged in.
Also FYI… I did:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1
sda being the USB drive… this should have cleared any boot sector on the USB, but it still gets stuck in a boot loop if the USB is plugged in.
Might be an power issue. The board will provide up to 1A per USB stack as long as the power supply is good. In your case, it might not be so try using a powered USB hub.
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I got a boot screen I simply must grab… had a few Atmel chips connected through the hub like you said. But, then I connected a USB drive to that same hub and the boot loop started… this time much slower. So I got an HDMI screen, plugged in, and the output was garbled; but something looking like a GRUB boot screen showed up. I couldn’t read the text, need to find a new screen with right HDMI input… but I do plan to get to the bottom of this now.
u-boot’s USB support is not as robust as Linux. It is what you see until after GRUB launches Linux. Sometimes certain devices do not enumerate properly in u-boot causing boot delay issues. This improves with every passing version of u-boot but could also be a cause. If you have garbled HDMI, do report your monitor information on this thread: AML GXL No Video on Monitor
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In that case, I think I have pinned down the exact Drive that is the problem, was picking them up from Costco:
SanDisk NVMe 1TB Extreme Portable SSD - Model SDSSDE61-1T00-AC
Anyways, Thanks for what you do. Keep up the good work. I can see this stuff is getting complex…
No pressure. For now I’m putting the USB line through a relay closed by LePotato’s GPIOs after full boot and user login.
Some of these portable drives are designed for 1.5A power consumption which exceeds what the USB stacks can put out. USB 2.0 normally provides 0.5A and USB 3.0 provides 0.9A. Le Potato provides up to 1A per stack. That drive requires CDP current levels so that is probably why it enumerates improperly. We recommend going with eMMC for the reason that it provide very good performance while not using much power.
Still can’t find a screen that shows a good output while data lines to the SanDisk are connected… But the GPIO to relay to USBHub to Drive method works great.
I got a little extra security out of the deal by forcing a legit login before anything can get to that drive.
And if it is not broke, don’t fix it.
A little confused. Did you manage to get what you are trying to do working?
I did… And I would strongly recommend anyone with hardware boot issues to use the same method an 8 Channel DC 5V Relay Module with Optocoupler is only ~10$ and this LePotato has the power to turn them all on. Why not do it that way? Not that you will need to turn them all on at boot time. Anyways, I would like to work on getting one of these things running Guix. I assume opening a topic on that would be in Software.
Luke, I had the same issue, it drove me nutz, until I found the solution in a raspberry pi forum somewhere. I had downloaded the OS, then flashed it to SD card, and then I got the reboot loop problem. You have to unzip of unpack the downloaded OS, and THEN flash the SD card. I did the same stupid thing! the zipped or compressed file WILL flash to SD card, but it’s missing the boot stuff!
This is mentioned in step 2 of the General Troubleshooting Guide.
So… random compressed files on the USB drive may have been tricking LePotato into attempting a boot from them… LOL… I’ll check the USB drives from now on, believing that SanDisk just makes low quality drives was easy… but I won’t write them a bad review now, thanks KJX.
I had problems with no HDMI output. The HDMI cable I was using was just working on my RPI. I tried another cable and it worked fine. Another thing to add to the ‘check this’ list for boot problems.
We need more information. Do you have the proper software on the MicroSD card?
Just got the Le Potato AML-S905X-CC today.
It just refuses to boot altogether. I’ve tried multiple MicroSD cards. I’ve tried multiple USB power cables. There’s power getting to the board because I see the red and blue lights, but that’s all that happens. Any ideas?
What OS image did you load onto the SD card?
Most likely one of the two:
- Didn’t extract the image. Windows hides file extensions by default which is probably the dumbest feature ever.
- The flash tool you are using did not flash properly or you didn’t select the right device.
If it’s the latter, dd works on mac. (Don’t mean to assume your os or anything)