Problem Installing Linux on Rock64

[Luke]

Nope, RAM size has nothing to do with it. Do you have an A-to-A cable and UART ? 

For starters, if you have an A-to-A cable could you follow the instructions here and later pastebin what rkflashtool n gives you with eMMC mounted on the board? 

[Rockfan]

Nope, RAM size has nothing to do with it. Do you have an A-to-A cable and UART ? 

For starters, if you have an A-to-A cable could you follow the instructions here and later pastebin what rkflashtool n gives you with eMMC mounted on the board? 

Sorry I dont know what an A to A cable is, nor a UART. So I guess the answer is no.

I just tried flashing and booting with image jessie-minimal-rock64-0.5.15-136-arm64.img.xz  
This just gives i/o buffer error mmcblkp1.

[Luke]

A-to-A USB cable

[Rockfan]

Just tried installing the armbian image:

Armbian_5.34.171121_Rock64_Ubuntu_xenial_default_4.4.77.img

but also same result.

The bios messages about self tests USB connected etc follow ok.

I can plug and unplug mouse and keyboard and the messages on the screen register this ok.

then comes stuff like

mail device driver loaded
ALSA device list

then a list of one lines starting with 'random'

random udevadm uninitialized urandom read

final line is:

random nonblocking pool is initialized

nothing more.

EDIT: Im saying 'bios messages' but maybe they are from the OS image. Some of them reference folders  like /devices and /drivers and BTRFS. The last message line comes about 5 seconds into the boot.

[wilsonYan]

if I was you I would test out the following:

* Try a different power supply, especially if the one you are using is below a 3A rating.

* See if you can get a slower SD card to try. It seems to me that (at least with mainline) the Rock64 may have some trouble with some cards. Like I have some Samsung EVO cards that seem to have problems with the Rock64 but slower Patriot Class 10 ones work OK.

[Rockfan]

if I was you I would test out the following:

* Try a different power supply, especially if the one you are using is below a 3A rating.

* See if you can get a slower SD card to try. It seems to me that (at least with mainline) the Rock64 may have some trouble with some cards. Like I have some Samsung EVO cards that seem to have problems with the Rock64 but slower Patriot Class 10 ones work OK.

Well I'm using the official power supply adapter which was supplied with the Rock64 so that shouldn't be an issue. 

Ive tried three different cards so far. I dont have a slower card than class 10, but the cards I have are all 2-3 years old, one of them brand new.