PC 2 does not boot with any distributive except armbian

rodionovalex

Hi,

I have tried all distributives (except android) located at Downloads under Orange PI PC 2 section, however none of it boots up except armbian which is not listed under this section.
All distributives from Download section end up with a blank screen and red or red and green LED on.

I use two Orange Pi PC2 v1.1 boards and two SD cards with proper 5V 2A power, HDMI, Keyboard, no Ethernet plugged; also tried with disconnected HDMI and no USB devices.
All combinations of boards and cards boot fine with armbian, but I did not manage to find any other Debian-based image which can boot properly.

Wiki says that the only thing I need to do to run e.g. Debian server is to copy image file to SD Card device via dd command, but it seems that it is not enough and I'm missing something.
Somwhere in the Internet I also found suggestion to copy script.bin file to BOOT partition (file generation is somehow related to loboris.eu/update_kernel.sh script), but I could not find anything regarding it in Wiki and few attempts I have made were not successful.

Please suggest what am I doing wrong and what is the right order to form SD card image based on these distributives?
Is there a method to troubleshoot at which stage my boot process halts?

Many thanks in advance.

Tina

Hi,
Please check first your power cable: if you have the official one or a 2A usb cable with diy plug, it should be fine. If the cable is too small, you will face problems.

Unfortunately the OPIs are quite sensible with too low voltages. Just to make sure that your power supply (PS) provides a stable 5V output: check with a volt/multimeter the 5V rail. For that you have to connect GPIO pin 2 or 4 (5V) and pin 6 (GND) to the voltmeter. If you get any voltage below 5.0V please try a different PS. The background here is that many PS do not give a stable voltage, eg phone or cheap chinese PS. I use a 5V 8A with my OPI PC, others reported that a PSP PS works and it has already the right plug. I did test a chinese PSP nockoff and it does not work (voltage drops down to ~4.7V).

Once this has been checked, we can try futher investgation, but by skipping these steps your OPI could be unstable and unprdictable.

PS:
I checked with my lab PS different voltages and funnily the armbian image was the only one which still booted below 5.0V. Other images did just stop at the boot sequence. That could be why your armbian works, but the others do not.

thc013

burning your sd card goes wrong nothing to do with power . only cheap very power consuming sd cards

armbian just comes in after the boot cycle and your failure is before that .

no screen en lan leds on is sign that the soc does not find any boot media .

do you include the bs in the dd command

Tina

thc013 replied at 2017-12-7 16:57
burning your sd card goes wrong nothing to do with power . only cheap very power consuming sd cards
...

no screen en lan leds on is sign that the soc does not find any boot media

or does not have enough power (due to low voltage) to continue the boot process...

rodionovalex

Tina replied at 2017-12-8 22:23
or does not have enough power (due to low voltage) to continue the boot process...

OK, so we have 2 versions:1. Due to insufficient power suply the board can't go on with boot, and presumably only non-armbian images somehow cause higher power comsumption.
2. Wrong SD image burn procesure which creates SD card with no proper boot loader.

As for power supply I use 5V 2A USB PS and I will check how stable it is, thanks for this assumption.
I would say I'm not 100% sure this is the reason because low voltage could make it unstable (e.g. when doing heavy calculations in armbian), but I does not seem plausible that one image consumes more power than another. Anyway worth to check.

I also assume that burn procedure is the cause of the problem, but on the other side I have tried it under windows with Win32DiskImager and under linux using two different computers and as I said before two different SD cards.
Win32DiskImager provides no options to tune, and in linux I have used dd with bs=4M and without it with the same result.
Power issue is not the case here as computer probably have enough power to write to the card and card filesystem is readable after the burn.

What I have noticed is that Armbian file system is different from other distributives. Armbian makes one partition and other distros from this site make two partitions: one named BOOT with bootloader probably and another one with linux files.
I believe that partition configurations or BOOT partition content have some kind of issues causing boot process to fail.

In order to confirm or reject this version, first I would like to ask dear readers of this forum: is there an alive eyewitness of debian distro from this web site working properly on Orange PI PC2?

Tina, I think you are one of those how have working distros from this web side, right?

Tina

Hi Rodio,
You are partially right, I got a working distro but not directly from this web side. I use armbian and RetrOrangePI, downloaded from their sides. Xunlong is not able to keep the distros up to date...

A wide guess, why armbian does not crash is that they use different modules/drivers which do not use so much power and maybe they have a different order of loading these modules during the boot process, hence they use less power and the voltage would not drop below the 'critical' threshold causing the OPI to freeze. But I am the wrong person to clarify that. ;)

Alec1of1

Hi Tina.
For every problem exist solution.  

Mega link    https://mega.nz/#F!gRslDSyA!V38QMj8__wT9qPB6hBB_-A

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