05-20-2020, 03:42 PM
Hello Piners!
I'm not getting any power to my Pinebook Pro anymore. I'll try to be as brief as possible with anything I can think of that's pertinent. - Purchased in November 2019, received January 2020. The power cord didn't work but USB-C charging did.
- Replaced the power cord & it's worked fine.
- I've swapped OSes on it a few times, both to the internal eMMC & a microSD card without issue.
- I've installed a Sabrent Rocket NVMe drive which, to the best of my understanding, supports the low-power spec & shouldn't be an issue (it ran fine with it for 3 weeks).
- I've looked at Luke's post which directs to the Pine wiki and was quite meticulous about how I disassembled & reassembled the Pinebook Pro (I've work in consumer IT & enterprise IT for 14 years, I've taken apart a large number of microelectronics if you're concerned about experience level).
- I've tried powering the Pinebook Pro on just the battery, AC adapter+battery, USB-C + battery, AC adapter only, and USB-C only. I saw warnings on another post about connecting AD adapter + USB-C at the same time & it causing damage to the CPU so I've avoided doing that.
- I've tried disconnecting the Sabrent NMVe drive.
- I've flipped the eMMC switch to both the on and off positions as once before this happened & for some reason that got it powering on again (not sure if this is actually related or just coincidental).
At present my Pinebook Pro's charging light by the DC jack does turn red for both the AC adapter and USB-C when connected. I've tried letting it charge overnight and I've left it alone for 2 weeks (hoping any residual power would discharge) before re-charging it. As it stands the system doesn't show the small green light on the top of the keyboard at all - it's not solid, it doesn't flash. Nothing happens on the LCD screen either, no hint of powering on (it never has until the system actually boots, I'm just covering my bases).
Are there any recommendations that anyone can suggest? Have I overlooked something? Should I contact Pine directly?
Thank you all for your time!
You haven't mentioned trying to see what is going on using a serial cable. That would tell you, I think, whether uboot was starting up at all. If you don't have one, you might try removing the emmc and throwing the switch and pressing the reset button, then trying to boot from a good sd card. It;s just possible that something is messed up with uboot on the emmc, (I am assuming that you are not running u-boot from SPI flash) so that the system never gets as far as lighting an led.
Hey belfastraven,
I apologize for being away for a few days, things got expectantly busy for me. Thank you for the suggestions! I'm afraid I don't have a serial cable nor ever used one (not entirely opposed to learning, however). I pulled the eMMC, flipped the switch again, and pressed the reset button. I've got a microSD card with Fedora on it & tried to boot. The power light came on and flashed green, very rapidly, for 15 or 20 seconds before turning solid green. It remained solid for maybe another minute before going out. Nothing showed on screen after that. I know Fedora can take a while to boot, 4 minutes or so, so I left it for about 10 minutes and there was no visible activity. I pulled out the microSD card, went through the same steps again, but this time the power light didn't come on again.
I'm afraid I don't know what SPI flash is, so I don't recall explicitly interacting with it. I've installed Manjaro 19.10 xfce on the eMMC, but that's it. So unless that's touched SPI flash I'm afraid I don't know how else it would've been interacted with. Or if Fedora on the microSD card touched SPI flash, but I never installed that to the eMMC (not sure if that's relevant at all).
Thank you again! If there's any other ideas you can throw my way I'd appreciate it.
(05-23-2020, 08:33 AM)jimsurvak Wrote: Hey belfastraven,
I apologize for being away for a few days, things got expectantly busy for me. Thank you for the suggestions! I'm afraid I don't have a serial cable nor ever used one (not entirely opposed to learning, however). I pulled the eMMC, flipped the switch again, and pressed the reset button. I've got a microSD card with Fedora on it & tried to boot. The power light came on and flashed green, very rapidly, for 15 or 20 seconds before turning solid green. It remained solid for maybe another minute before going out. Nothing showed on screen after that. I know Fedora can take a while to boot, 4 minutes or so, so I left it for about 10 minutes and there was no visible activity. I pulled out the microSD card, went through the same steps again, but this time the power light didn't come on again.
I'm afraid I don't know what SPI flash is, so I don't recall explicitly interacting with it. I've installed Manjaro 19.10 xfce on the eMMC, but that's it. So unless that's touched SPI flash I'm afraid I don't know how else it would've been interacted with. Or if Fedora on the microSD card touched SPI flash, but I never installed that to the eMMC (not sure if that's relevant at all).
Thank you again! If there's any other ideas you can throw my way I'd appreciate it.
I think this pretty much shows that this is not a power problem. The reason I suggested using a serial cable (you plug one end into the audio headphone jack on the pbp, flip the use serial switch on the pbp , plug the other end of the cable into a usb port on your computer, and then run a program like minicom (if you are on linux )--
like e.g.
sudo minicom /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 1500000
and then when you power on the pbp, you will be able to see the initial u-boot messages, log into the system if it boots, check to see if there is a kernel panic, whatever.
The reason I suggested you remove the EMMC, and flip the switch to NOT use the emmc and press reset was to make sure that machine wasn't trying to do anything with it; If it has somehow gotten corrupted, there may be problems even in booting from an SD card.
Perhaps you could try a different distribution, e.g. a Manjaro 20.04, just the one running off of the SD card. You might also check to see if you can find what the blinking green LEDS mean in the Fedora distribution for the pbp. Different distributions use different color/flashing leds for various purposes. You might get some info that way.
Do you have an adapter so that you can write to the EMMC directly from your computer? If not, you might want to think about getting one. They are very inexpensive and make it easy to fix problems on the EMMC.
I can't disagree with you. I've tried Manajro, Armbian, and the factory Debian OS via a microSD card - all have some variation of a solid green light or blinking green light with nothing on-screen. So yes, it's safe to say it's not a power issue.
I'll have to order a serial cable & eMMC adapter, don't have either. Once I do I'll see what I can find and maybe ask around here for some help. Should I mark this thread as resolved & create a new one when the time comes? Since this isn't a power issue I don't want to lead anyone astray.
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