I am wondering if anyone else has had any success getting Armbian installed on a Banana Pi M5.  I'm definitely a noob at this.  After thinking the first M5 I tried it on was perhaps defective, but after trying on a second M5 I had the same result, board will not boot and the Green, Blue and Red lights on the board are all solid (not blinking).  I'm afraid I may have bricked both boards.  I used bpi-copy to flash the on-board emmc and did not receive any errors in the process.  I am unable to boot from emmc or sd card at this point.  I tried flashing the SD Card with Debian Bullseye and then on another attempt Ubuntu server (both images had worked previously) but to no avail.  If anyone has tips or information that could lead me in the right direction, I sure would appreciate it.   

 

5 minutes ago, mrpickles said:

I used bpi-copy to flash the on-board emmc and did not receive any errors in the process. 

Where did you download "Armbian" for Bananapi M5?

Seems like they offer "Armbian" images themselves: https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-M5#Armbian

 

Hi,

 

In the past I have had reasonable success with installing Armbian on S905x3 TV boxes.

 

Recently I purchased a Bananapi M5 which uses the same processor with the hope of having a more reliable setup.

 

I have tried to run the various versions of the desktop version for this board. The Noble version gets stuck at installation stage. The Cinnamon version takes forever to install but never completes the installation. The Bookworm version install very slowly but only to command line mode.

 

On the other hand, Ubuntu Mate from the BananaPi site installs pretty fast and most, but not all, packages can be run satisfactorily.

 

Any idea what is going on?

 

I think there are some problems with the latest download, I had a quick look (very quick) at Armbian_24.5.1_Bananapim5_noble_current_6.6.31_xfce_desktop and Chromium was installed but didn't work, and there were some issues with USB. I didn't investigate any further.

The earlier version worked well except for some errors in dmesg - I'd try that to see if it works better for you.

Thanks for your help. I see your install appears to have gone better than min even if you still had errors. So I wonder if I have other issues as well!

I have installed older versions of Armbian namely the Feb24 version as well as the Aug23 version. Unlike the May24 versions, both installed properly but ran rather slow compared to the BPI Ubuntu version. Unfortunately after a while they hang up and the only solution is to reset the board.

I've just looked and the build I use is:

https://fi.mirror.armbian.de/archive/bananapim5/archive/Armbian_24.2.1_Bananapim5_jammy_current_6.6.16_xfce_desktop.img.xz

 

Some of the builds around that time had issues with the regulatory database not being signed correctly (might not be a problem for you), this one was OK.