Hello, i'M having this issue with the latest Armbian 5.75 stretch image with updated firmware.

 

When booting with a huwei E303 modem is in the usb port the board fall in a eternal reboot.

 

if i let the board boot as normal an then insert the modem everything is o.k. I tried with 4 others OPI PC+ and others E303 sticks, same thing.

 

also tried with 5.65, same problem.

 

BUT,  with an earlier version 5.35 and it boots as normal.

 

 

Edited March 9, 20197 yr by jupiter8

1 hour ago, jupiter8 said:

When booting with a huwei E303 modem is in the usb port the board fall in a eternal reboot.

Try to capture logs during boot process using a USB-TTL Serial dongle and provide us the errors that are responsible of such reboot...

 

I don't have one actually (gonna get one this week) but here's a picture of the boot message

Wow ! It seems to crash very very early !

That doesn´t sound good ...

Maybe power supply issue ... What kind of PSU are you using ?

 

Original power supply that comes with the OPI kit also tried with my  home made atx power supply and industrial regulated psu all 5.2 v and 3A.

Strange that it works with 5.35...

15 minutes ago, jupiter8 said:

Strange that it works with 5.35...

Maybe the old 5.35 didn't scan the USB ports to find Mass Storage.

If you don't need MS in U-Boot and still both from SDCard, maybe you can build your own custom U-Boot with USB disabled ...

Well, i never played with U-Boot is there some good tutorial you can recomand?

 

Also i presume we shall consider this a bug and it's not being adressed since 5.38 at least (just tried it on another OPI that ia had and it worked) 

and no one seems to experienced this based on a quick search.

 

Is anybody having a 3g dongle could duplicate this?

 

Thanks to all.

25 minutes ago, jupiter8 said:

Well, i never played with U-Boot is there some good tutorial you can recomand?

I'm not sure how are you ready to get your feet wet, but take a look at Armbian build process : https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Build-Preparation/

 

25 minutes ago, jupiter8 said:

Also i presume we shall consider this a bug

Maybe, but not an Armbian bug, but a U-Boot bug ...

The fact that it is appear after 5.38 is simply because we have enabled the functionality for some people that are using USB dongle or USB HDD as booting devices.

The bug with your 3G dongle maybe exist since ever, but no one faced the issue until now ... Maybe some other kind of 3G dongle will work, I don't know ...

 

Unfortunately i don't have time to get those feet any wetter than this... 

The only way to get out of this is to roll back, i'll try the 5.30 image from the archives.

 

 

I tried the raspian image for OPI and it works, should i stay with that or Jessy 5.30?

 

My use of this SBC is only to get values from a PLC via Node-red and sent to MQTT if it works it will stay as is without updates as nothing will change in this setup.

 

Thanks for helping Martin.

1 hour ago, jupiter8 said:

I tried the raspian image for OPI and it works, should i stay with that or Jessy 5.30?

( raspian != Armbian )

Yes, you can stay on Jessy 5.30, but you can also backup u-Boot from this 5.30, keep it aside, and overwrite the U-Boot on your recent image, you will then have both benefit ...

Awsome, thanks. This would fix my problem. 

 

May i ask for a little guidance on this? I looked a bit on how to do this and i'm a bit at loss...

8 hours ago, jupiter8 said:

May i ask for a little guidance on this?

First, boot you Jessie 5.30 to do a u-boot backup :

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=uboot-backup.img bs=1024 skip=8 count=750

Then, copy this uboot-backup.img elsewhere, over network for example.

Halt the OPiPC, and then exchange the SDCard to boot latest Armbian.

Restore the uboot-backup.img by overwriting the current one :

dd if=uboot-backup.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1024 seek=8

Then, reboot ... You will see that u-boot is the old one but image itself is the new one ...

Retest the boot phase with you 3G dongle plugged in ...

 

Sadly this doesn't work for me it falls into an eternal boot again without anything plugged in. tried with 5.30's U-Boot and latest armbian fresh install, changed password, made user pi, no updates, saved U-boot, swapped OS, same thing, changed pw, made user pi and put back U-Boot, tried with 2 differents OPI an PSU. 

 

 

34 minutes ago, jupiter8 said:

Sadly this doesn't work for me it falls into an eternal boot again without anything plugged in.

I don't understand : you were saying that 5.30 u-boot was working properly with the 3G plugged, and now you are talking about eternal boot without anything plugged !

So, maybe the issue is your board itself, starting to get into hardware troubles ...

That's exactly the case: 5.30' U-Boot transplant into 5.75 wthout anything plugged won't boot. Tried with 2 differents boards. will try with lower versions just for see...

O.K. , after further investigations it seems that commenting out the line with "auto" in "/etc/network interfaces" cure the problem as at boot,  the O.S.  won't try to do whatever with the device i named "gprs" (my usb cell dongle)

 

#auto gprs
allow-hotplug gprs
iface gprs inet ppp
provider gprs

 

Now everything is good.