baryon

With the most recent minimal Debian image, Armbian_26.2.1_Bananapim2s_trixie_current_6.18.15_minimal.img on my A311D, I hit a problem with Xorg. Instead of starting up into dwm via lightdm's autologin, all I got was the blank blinking cursor screen. Working through it with an LLM, the resolution worked out to be adding a stanza to Xorg.conf. Section "ServerFlags" Option "AutoAddGPU" "false" EndSection Is this the correct solution? Is this known or understood? I know nothing about any of this. I presume it's related to how the devices look to Xorg via the kernel, but I have no understanding beyond that level, if that's even correct.

Hah. I switched to using the cheapest one I had and that worked. But thank you for the validation. This was indeed the correct strategem.

I mean, I've verified that the image is correctly written to the SD card on my PC. So it's not that, unless the M2S itself is not reading reliably. The frustrating part is that U-Boot appears to read the image correctly enough to get going but the kernel that boots does not. Ah well. I was hoping that there was some documented problem but this forum is a ghost town, and even finding old images to try is a struggle. I'm using an old, legit Lexar 16GB SD card, so I really don't think it's a legitimacy-of-SD-card issue. Two PCs and an Android phone both tell me there's no problem with the written data here. When I set this computer up three years ago, there was no hint of any of this. It was just plug and play and all was golden.

Hello! I recently ran updates on the old M2S I won from here, and that appeared to break my OS, so I went back to try reinstall. And that's where I hit a snag. For some reason, after booting, the kernels refuse to see the partitions on the SD card. /dev/mmcblk0 exists, but none of the subpartitions, and so the boot process cannot find the partition it's supposed to boot from. Neither Armbian_25.5.1_Bananapim2s_trixie_current_6.12.32_minimal.img.xz nor Armbian_26.2.1_Bananapim2s_trixie_current_6.18.15_minimal.img.xz get me past this issue. I've tried changing the power supply, debug with LLMs, but nothing appears to be working. Any suggestions?

The problems you're facing are consistent with failing storage. Whether that's the SD or the onboard MMC remains to be seen. Of course, it might not be, either, but this would be where I start the diagnostic: try swap that SD.