Hi,

 

I can boot off an SD card, but my Teres boots off internal storage to a black screen and I'm trying to figure out why.  It seems even when I set verbose=7 in /boot/armbianEnv.txt, there is little to no kernel diagnostic output, even on a working SD card.  I read on the debian wiki that u-boot-menu works on the Teres, but I tried installing this on an SD card and it prevents the SD card from booting (similarly to my internal storage booting issue).

 

I've actually compared the contents of the unallocated space in front of the filesystem between the working sdcard and the internal storage, and they differ only in the partition table.  Additionally /lib/firmware, /lib/modules, /boot/dtb-5.4.28-sunxi64, /boot/boot.cmd and /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.28-sunxi64 all compare byte-for-byte identical.  /boot/boot.scr differs in only 8 bytes (0x4-0xC) which could be a timestamp.  /boot/armbianEnv.txt differs in only the value of rootdev.

 

The initrd differs between the two in that the contents of blacklist-framebuffer.conf, libdns-export.so.1100, and libisc-export.so.169 differ.  blacklist-framebuffer.conf differs only in that the internal storage has bochs-drm added to the blacklisting.  I wasn't sure how to extract the uinitrd to see if it had corruption.

 

I tried replacing my differing files with those from the working sdcard but the system still did not boot, although it could have been for a different reason as there is no diagnostic output.

 

Do you know a way to see more diagnostics than verbose=7 provides, or another avenue to pursue?

 

I am likely next to try reinstalling the system and comparing files and bytes between before and after.  I don't have an easy mailing address at this time to order the serial cable.

Edited May 20, 20206 yr by xloem

After much comparing, I think the issue is that I had set the default systemd target to "emergency" to launch a single-user shell to maintain the system.  This seems to prevent booting.

Edited May 25, 20206 yr by xloem
typo

To update, this kind of situation seems much eased on the newer images, where early boot output is visible on the screen.

In case of Focal, this

was probably the problem - recreated initrd was sometimes corrupted and its been recently fixed by changing compression method. You need to re-download image. v20.05.4