[SOLVED] PBP will no longer power on

[s3rvant]

After receiving my PBP and tinkering with Manjaro (including fully updating the system) I decided I'd rather try out a more familiar distro so flashed @mrjay 's Ubuntu image; details here:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...0#pid68220

The battery was showing 20% when flashing completed however once the system powered down it will no longer power up. The power button does not appear to have any effect at all.

I've tried searching the forums here for similar issues and so far have tried:

• Booting with / without A/C adapter plugged in
  
• Booting with / without SD card inserted
  
• Verified that A/C adapter is charging (light comes on, charges then turns off)
  
• Verified the A/C adapters are working by charging a 2nd PBP that is still working
  
• Removed the battery, connected the power bypass cable and attempted to power on with A/C adapter
  
• Reseated the eMMC
  
• Booting with / without eMMC hardware switch toggled
  

Nothing appears to have had any effect and I'm not sure what else I can do; any advice would be much appreciated

[TDC_PBP]

After receiving my PBP and tinkering with Manjaro (including fully updating the system) I decided I'd rather try out a more familiar distro so flashed @mrjay 's Ubuntu image; details here:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...0#pid68220

The battery was showing 20% when flashing completed however once the system powered down it will no longer power up. The power button does not appear to have any effect at all.

I've tried searching the forums here for similar issues and so far have tried:

• Booting with / without A/C adapter plugged in
  
• Booting with / without SD card inserted
  
• Verified that A/C adapter is charging (light comes on, charges then turns off)
  
• Verified the A/C adapters are working by charging a 2nd PBP that is still working
  
• Removed the battery, connected the power bypass cable and attempted to power on with A/C adapter
  
• Reseated the eMMC
  
• Booting with / without eMMC hardware switch toggled
  

Nothing appears to have had any effect and I'm not sure what else I can do; any advice would be much appreciated

It almost sounds like you activated some thermal overload protection on the board...maybe try removing all bootable media (EMMC, MicroSD) and attempting to boot up? Even if there is no bootable media, the power light should at least turn red. If it doesn't, your board was probably damaged somehow. If you cannot get it to work, maybe contact sales@pine64.org to see if you can get a new board sent to you. This sounds like a really bizarre problem...Good luck!

[Phillip Bell]

The fail to boot happened to me as well.  I believe it was some sort of thermal overload protection, and I suspect we'll see more people posting on this, as Summer Solstice is nearly here and things are gonna get toasty.  I think the designers may have relied too much on the metal chassis for heat dissipation and the power-sipping properties of the CPU.  The problem, as I guess it, is that the battery gets hot, or at least the area immediately under the battery.  That may either trigger some sort of thermal overload, or transmit heat to the motherboard area.

The solution for me was do nothing.  After one hour in power off, PBP cooled down enough and after that, it started up fine.

I would be willing to wait at least overnight to see if it returns the next day before I started tearing it down.  Moving and re-seating components can cause more problems.

External cooling options maybe worth the money as it gets hotter this year.

[s3rvant]

It almost sounds like you activated some thermal overload protection on the board...maybe try removing all bootable media (EMMC, MicroSD) and attempting to boot up? Even if there is no bootable media, the power light should at least turn red. If it doesn't, your board was probably damaged somehow. If you cannot get it to work, maybe contact sales@pine64.org to see if you can get a new board sent to you. This sounds like a really bizarre problem...Good luck!

Tried without boot media but still no lights from pressing power button. Will send an email to see what they think.

I had already let it sit overnight so system has definitely cooled off plenty.

Odd thing thermal-wise is that the system wasn't under heavy load or anything. I had only updated, check pamac and Firefox to see what packages were available etc. and gparted to work with my SD card. Nothing that I would think intensive enough to cause high CPU / thermal load (no audio / video at all).

[s3rvant]

Will send an email to see what they think.

No response from sales. Submitted a support ticket.

[brzegorz]

It's very probable that something went wrong with the flashing. Do you have external emmc adapter? You could try to flash OS again. I've had an identical issue - I've flashed a wrong image and couldn't do anything with PBP until I've flashed a good one. I couldn't get the light to work or boot from SD - it was as if PBP got bricked. Reflashing solved the problem.

[s3rvant]

It's very probable that something went wrong with the flashing. Do you have external emmc adapter? You could try to flash OS again. I've had an identical issue - I've flashed a wrong image and couldn't do anything with PBP until I've flashed a good one. I couldn't get the light to work or boot from SD - it was as if PBP got bricked. Reflashing solved the problem.

No I do not have an external adapter however they are fairly cheap so I'll grab one and give it a whirl; thanks for the info

[s3rvant]

Adapter arrived today and was indeed able to use it to recover. I used 2nd PBP to dd their entire drive to IMG file then dd'd that to my drive at which point it booted just fine.

Of note support did have me try bypassing the eMMC and using android image on SD to boot however that too had no response from pressing power button; it wasn't until I had restored the eMMC and pressed the reset button that it then started working again.

Thanks again brzegorz for the tip

[prokofiev]

Hello!

I have a problem very similar to the one you have had recently. My PBP seems to have died after flashing the emmc card. It just doesn't respond when you press the power key.

I'm going to try to get an emmc to usb adapter and re-flash the emmc. But I see that you have not flashed a Manjaro installation image, but an exact copy of another emmc. Is that essential? Isn't it enough to flash an image downloaded from the Manjaro-arm website?

[s3rvant]

I see that you have not flashed a Manjaro installation image, but an exact copy of another emmc. Is that essential? Isn't it enough to flash an image downloaded from the Manjaro-arm website?

Yes that should be sufficient. I'm still very new to PBP and wasn't sure what would be needed to fix the issue so just used a 2nd PBP eMMC to ensure I had restored it to factory condition. Now that I've had more time to tinker with the PBP and try other images I've found that as long as the image you use contains all the necessary partitions it should restore just fine. The specific image I was testing was of only a single partition which is why the PBP soft-bricked since dd'ing the entire eMMC with just that 1 partition was not sufficient. Since then a new image has been added to the wiki of the same OS I was after which includes all the necessary partitions and that does indeed work well.

TL;DR: Flashing an official image via USB to eMMC should solve your issue