Hi, I am returning to Armbian after quite a few years. I was trying to follow guidance from nexbox-a95x-armbian and after a search found the debian &  Ubunt images (https://www.armbian.com/uefi-arm64/) which I downloaded and wrote to a USB using Rufus (also balenaEtcher). I then tries to look at the FAT32 partition contents but the GPT was corrupt - tried many windows tools and Linux.I "repaired" the GPT using Linux tools but then the FAT32 filesystem was corrupt.

 

What am I doing wrong?

 

any help much appreciated

If I remember correctly, recently there was a similar thread on the forum re GPT corruption under windows. Not sure, but there might be some useful info.

Alternatively, flashing under Linux might be an option.

There are various recent reports of windows corrupting the partition table.   

Well using Linux to write the USB appears to have fixed the problems. 

Damn Windows

 

Thank you for the pointers, much appreciated. 

Although writing the USB using Linux produced a good GPT the efi partition (FAT32) is unmountable and hence I cannot change anything. I tried gparted to fix it but the checkdisk failed. Hence I cannot follow the original guidance I had found. 

 

Where am I going wrong?

 

thank again for any help

 

 

Flashing under Linux  you will have many options to do it and check some problems on partitions etc. Normally, I use the Balena Etcher and dd by console. 

4 hours ago, kevinH said:

cannot follow the original guidance

What guidance are you trying to follow?

The guidance I found is on Github, nexbox-a95x-arm https://github.com/berci9ke101/nexbox-a95x-armbianbian. I think its similar to some guidance I looked at when I first looked at Armbian and how I got Coreelec to run on my A95X box

First off, I would recommend using the "psuedo official" instructions from this site:

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/33676-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus

 

And there you will find the following warning:

Note: If you have previously run other distributions on the box such as coreelec the below installation will not work.  You will need to restore the original android firmware before attempting the install.  coreelec changes the boot environment in ways that are incompatible with these Armbian builds.

 

 

Disabling automount (drive letter assignment) in windows before flashing might help - probably it is mount time when windows is checking and changing partition table.

Thank you SteelMan for the pointer.

Downloaded the rolling build and wrote it to my USB using balenaEtcher in Windows, the resulting USB was MBR and I could read the boot partitions contents. That's a massive improvement from using the images from https://www.armbian.com/uefi-arm64/ which were GPT and regardless of writing the USB under Windows/Linux the boot partition was unreadable.

 

My box is probably an A95X Max (S905x2 SOC, 4G Ram, gbit ethernet & 5g wifi) so the uboot should be u-boot-s905x2-s922

 

All that's left is to find the best dtb 

 

Thanks for all the help

the guide has a warning: 

 

Note: If you have previously run other distributions on the box such as coreelec the below installation will not work.  You will need to restore the original android firmware before attempting the install.  coreelec changes the boot environment in ways that are incompatible with these Armbian builds.

 

I have run coreelec but only ever from an SD card, I don't think the firmware has ever been changed as if I remove the SD card it boots into the original android system. Is this likely to be true or am I again missing something. 

You are missing something.  The boot process starts with the uboot from the emmc (even if ultimately booting the SD card).  And coreelec changes the uboot environment of the emmc in ways that are incompatible with with the armbian code.  So you need to reflash a fresh android image if you want to use armbian as that will restore the basic state that armbian is expecting.

fair enough, no idea where i would get the right android image from for my unknown box so I guess I am stuffed putting Armbian on my box. never mind, will repurpose an old laptop when corelec updates for the s905x2 stop

 

thanks for the help