hello guys,
tried to flash the latest debian trixie os from armbain on nanopi neo using armbian-install, but it would never boot up again.

any clue?

NanoPi-NEO does not have eMMC, so it must be SD-card

 

But no one has a clue

 

You must provide logs from USB-TTL serial debug/console cable

 

sorry the sbc is nanopi neo core
but m using the latest nanopi neo os  provided here:
https://armbian.com/boards/nanopineo
but i could not flash the image to the EMMC

i will provide the logs 

sorry for being late
this is the output of the los from the debug port:

U-Boot SPL 2026.07_armbian-2026.07-Sece3-Pd4c7-Hb9d5-Ve3b8-B5da4-R448a (Aug 19 2026 - 16:33:43 +0000)
DRAM: 512 MiB
Trying to boot from MMC2
MMC Device 1 not found
spl: could not find mmc device 1. error: -19
Error: -19
SPL: Unsupported Boot Device!
SPL: failed to boot from all boot devices
### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

On 8/26/2026 at 3:05 PM, souad said:

 the sbc is nanopi neo core
using the latest nanopi neo os  provided here:

You cannot simply shove image for board X on an sdcard into board Y and expect stuff to work. This isn't x86 world where all hw has a standardized interface....

1 hour ago, souad said:

U-Boot SPL 2026.07_armbian-2026.07-Sece3-Pd4c7-Hb9d5-Ve3b8-B5da4-R448a (Aug 19 2026 - 16:33:43 +0000)
DRAM: 512 MiB
Trying to boot from MMC2
MMC Device 1 not found

I used this for a test on 1 on my NanoPi-NEO's:

 

15c936536d45ddd91e23c41e36b87f5df56ac3e2807cd5c3129960a8c4ff514d Armbian_community_26.11.0-trunk.19_Nanopineo_trixie_current_6.18.45_minimal.img.xz

 

I am not sure if you use the exact same image, but at least the U-Boot version is the same on mine as from your log. BUT the is the normal Nanopi-NEO, no eMMC, so just the SD-card which is then labled as MMC1

 

So I got this:

U-Boot SPL 2026.07_armbian-2026.07-Sece3-Pd4c7-Hb9d5-Ve3b8-B5da4-R448a (Aug 19 2026 - 16:33:43 +0000)
DRAM: 512 MiB
Trying to boot from MMC1


U-Boot 2026.07_armbian-2026.07-Sece3-Pd4c7-Hb9d5-Ve3b8-B5da4-R448a (Aug 19 2026 - 16:33:43 +0000) Allwinner Technology

CPU:   Allwinner H3 (SUN8I 1680)
Model: FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO
DRAM:  512 MiB
Core:  64 devices, 18 uclasses, devicetree: separate
WDT:   Not starting watchdog@1c20ca0
MMC:   mmc@1c0f000: 0
Loading Environment from FAT... Unable to use mmc 0:1...
In:    serial,usbkbd
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   eth0: ethernet@1c30000
starting USB...
USB EHCI 1.00
USB OHCI 1.0
USB EHCI 1.00
USB OHCI 1.0
Bus usb@1c1a000: 1 USB Device(s) found
Bus usb@1c1a400: 1 USB Device(s) found
Bus usb@1c1d000: 1 USB Device(s) found
Bus usb@1c1d400: 1 USB Device(s) found

 

Now with the Core, where there are 2x mmc objects (SD-card and eMMC), the U-Boot gets confused and/or wrong as the image is for the normal NEO, not the Core with eMMC.

 

It might be that this U-Boot has the code for both, so 2x mmc, but just picks the wrong number. And additional confusion is that those numbers could have been swapped in the past decade, depending on with OS and/or version.

 

It is also not clear if your log is from boot with- or without SD-card. I would act as if the eMMC is not there and just boot the image from SD-card. If that does not work, then you need to dig really deep in to the U-Boot source code, both mainline (this version) an hopefully something from FriendlyElec (years old I think). At least first try to wipe the eMMC and use only SD-card.

hello @Werner well this same image used to work with nanopi neo core as well and i used to flash system to emmc using these images.

and @eselarm well yes m using same exact image: Armbian_community_26.11.0-trunk.19_Nanopineo_trixie_current_6.18.45_minimal.img.xz
and yes it works fine on sd card on both nanopi neo and nanopi neo core. no issues.
the issue arises after flashing system to emmc which then never boots up
using serial port and inspect files at /boot and other directories i could not find what would be the reason of this odd behavior.
but since i have an older os which has a working bootloader for emmc i just did this:
 dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=1k skip=8 seek=8 count=1024 status=progress
where mmcblk2 refers to emmc and i replaced only 1st 1MB
and now it works alright. and it booted up from emmc.
m not sure if this workaround is sufficient.

On 9/2/2026 at 4:51 PM, souad said:

an older os

I have not really done anything with FriendlyElec images for my NanoPi-NEO's, at the time I got them it was Armbian Buster, I changed 1 rootfs Ext4 in to bootfs Ext4 and rootfs Btrfs and that was on my first 256MiB board. 4 others are 512MiB and I just did clone with minimal changed, only ssh keys and MAC address basically. The U-Boot I kept the same until Armbian Trixie as I in-place dist-upgrade and did not really change it expect for 1 where I tested BTRFS enabled U-Boot, so an own re-compile with just 2 config statements changed. I have no clue how much difference there is between let's say a 2021 U-Boot for the NEO and the one you use. It might be that it is rather similar and not totally incompatible like we see for Rockchip U-boot (legacy/vendor v.s. mainline).  So I guess if you want to know, as I indicated, you need to compare sources of the old and current.

Edited September 4Sep 4 by eselarm
fix typos

@eselarm sorry for not being precise.
 what i did is that i booted from sd card newest image 6.18.45
then i wrote system on emmc using armbian-install
then  i did this sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=1k skip=8 seek=8 count=1024 status=progress
which copied 1st MB from sd card (6.18.45) which is working good to emmc which is not functioning and then i rebooted and it worked fine.

so i only used the new image and not the older one at all.

sorry again for misleading

Edited September 3Sep 3 by souad