PBP not booting screen blank after SD card boot

[Jakobp]

Hey there. I hope I can get a bit of inspiration for further problem shooting for my seemingly dead pbp. LEDs turn red then green(solid) as expected but screen doesn’t turn on at all. All worked perfectly until I wanted to test Manjaro i3 from SD card. I have Manjaro KDE  on eMmc installed already. Ok booted Manjaro i3 from SD card all worked fine. I updated this distro installed a few things from repository and built Vivaldi browser from AUR using Parmac. Then when rebooting I got the issue above. I thought there was something wrong with SD card and ejected and re booted only to see same issue with my installed system - nothing boots. I tried to charge in full then let it go completely flat in case of some endless sleep cycle ( this took about 20 hours). Any suggestions why the screen is just completely black? I know very little about things like gpu etc. so don’t know if any faulty hardware is preventing something to start screen? I’m really at a loss - I haven’t touched the hardware inside I have only flashed a card. SD card 32 gb and worked fine when I had Debian and Manjaro KDE on card. Any ideas??

[belfastraven]

Hey there. I hope I can get a bit of inspiration for further problem shooting for my seemingly dead pbp. LEDs turn red then green(solid) as expected but screen doesn’t turn on at all. All worked perfectly until I wanted to test Manjaro i3 from SD card. I have Manjaro KDE  on eMmc installed already. Ok booted Manjaro i3 from SD card all worked fine. I updated this distro installed a few things from repository and built Vivaldi browser from AUR using Parmac. Then when rebooting I got the issue above. I thought there was something wrong with SD card and ejected and re booted only to see same issue with my installed system - nothing boots. I tried to charge in full then let it go completely flat in case of some endless sleep cycle ( this took about 20 hours). Any suggestions why the screen is just completely black? I know very little about things like gpu etc. so don’t know if any faulty hardware is preventing something to start screen? I’m really at a loss - I haven’t touched the hardware inside I have only flashed a card. SD card 32 gb and worked fine when I had Debian and Manjaro KDE on card. Any ideas??

 If you are seeing the green light,  the machine may very well have booted,  but has some kind of display issue. As a first step have you tried re-writing the sd card with the Manjaro i3 that originally did boot and trying to boot from that?    IF that works you know it's a software problem...  

Also,  have you tried using the f2 key to turn up the brightness?  ..in case somehting in the update turned it down......

 I'm assuming you don't have a serial cable.  it's very helpful to have serial output at times like this.   You can watch the booting sequence and usually can see where the system is hanging or failing.  Often,  if its something like a software display problem, you can fix it....

[wdt]

If you think it has booted, and the problem is a dark screen......
I make that guess based on led behavior, might be some other problem....
Remove card, mount on some other (linux) computer
cd card/root
edit/ make a file called "bright" (probably need sudo/su)
----------------------
#/usr/bin/bash
cd /sys/class/backlight/edp-backlight
echo 3200 >brightness
--------------------
sudo chmod 777 bright

boot with card, ctr-alt-F2, do it twice, wait until sure is booted
All this is blind, type carefully
login as root,, ./bright,, alt-F1
Then do same to emmc if necessary (edit booted from SD)
Sometimes the fn-F2 does not work, for sure does not work in vt
This forces adequate brightness, not sure why it persists with another (different) boot

[tophneal]

Have you tried booting another, non-Manjaro OS from SD since this issue started?

[TheWalt]

I have this exact same problem from doing the exact same thing.

Wanted to try out Manjaro XFCE so wrote it to SD, booted fine, ran updates, rebooted and now black screen.

I've tried with power, battery only, bypassing battery, turning off eMMC via switch, zero luck and pretty frustrated.

Going to try a different OS as suggested.

[TheWalt]

I tried archlinuxarm and it worked, system booted fine and I was able to mount the eMMC. So is the Manjaro image breaking something after update?

[Jakobp]

Hey there. I hope I can get a bit of inspiration for further problem shooting for my seemingly dead pbp. LEDs turn red then green(solid) as expected but screen doesn’t turn on at all. All worked perfectly until I wanted to test Manjaro i3 from SD card. I have Manjaro KDE  on eMmc installed already. Ok booted Manjaro i3 from SD card all worked fine. I updated this distro installed a few things from repository and built Vivaldi browser from AUR using Parmac. Then when rebooting I got the issue above. I thought there was something wrong with SD card and ejected and re booted only to see same issue with my installed system - nothing boots. I tried to charge in full then let it go completely flat in case of some endless sleep cycle ( this took about 20 hours). Any suggestions why the screen is just completely black? I know very little about things like gpu etc. so don’t know if any faulty hardware is preventing something to start screen? I’m really at a loss - I haven’t touched the hardware inside I have only flashed a card. SD card 32 gb and worked fine when I had Debian and Manjaro KDE on card. Any ideas??

 If you are seeing the green light,  the machine may very well have booted,  but has some kind of display issue. As a first step have you tried re-writing the sd card with the Manjaro i3 that originally did boot and trying to boot from that?    IF that works you know it's a software problem...  

Also,  have you tried using the f2 key to turn up the brightness?  ..in case somehting in the update turned it down......

 I'm assuming you don't have a serial cable.  it's very helpful to have serial output at times like this.   You can watch the booting sequence and usually can see where the system is hanging or failing.  Often,  if its something like a software display problem, you can fix it....

Hey there thanks for your response - Good idea to re-write the SD Card with a Manjaro i3 as a known system - What I have done so far is downloading and writing Debian (Mr. Fix it version) that the PBP  came with only to get the exact same - red LED few seconds then solid green. I have tried all key combinations as you suggest but without any change (also though perhaps it was set to external monitor for some strange reason). Thank you so much for suggesting the serial cable - I don't have but strongly considering buying

[Jakobp]

Have you tried booting another, non-Manjaro OS from SD since this issue started?

Yes, Mr. FixIt Debian but same issue and exact same behaviour - The only other machine I have available is running Windows and used WinFLASHTool (found in a guide by someone writing Raspbian to SD Card and didn't seem to have any problems booting) to write the image and seemed to write without problems. I saw further down in this thread the suggestion of trying Arch Arm linux and will try that too to see if it works

[wdt]

>The only other machine I have available is running Windows
Err, there is such a thing as live cd/live usb
You do need to be able to boot from usb,, get into bios,, turn OFF windows fastboot
(all above in reverse,,,, or burn a cd/dvd if you can, usb much faster)
Nearly all iso images are "hybrid" images, can just be dd'd to usb, raw device, not partition
(but chicken-egg, I'm sure winflash will work too)
Most, nowadays, are rather large (2GB+), simple one (and somewhat charming)
http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pup...0-uefi.iso
livecdlist seems somewhat defunct, old, but links still work

[Jakobp]

Hey there. I hope I can get a bit of inspiration for further problem shooting for my seemingly dead pbp. LEDs turn red then green(solid) as expected but screen doesn’t turn on at all. All worked perfectly until I wanted to test Manjaro i3 from SD card. I have Manjaro KDE  on eMmc installed already. Ok booted Manjaro i3 from SD card all worked fine. I updated this distro installed a few things from repository and built Vivaldi browser from AUR using Parmac. Then when rebooting I got the issue above. I thought there was something wrong with SD card and ejected and re booted only to see same issue with my installed system - nothing boots. I tried to charge in full then let it go completely flat in case of some endless sleep cycle ( this took about 20 hours). Any suggestions why the screen is just completely black? I know very little about things like gpu etc. so don’t know if any faulty hardware is preventing something to start screen? I’m really at a loss - I haven’t touched the hardware inside I have only flashed a card. SD card 32 gb and worked fine when I had Debian and Manjaro KDE on card. Any ideas??

 If you are seeing the green light,  the machine may very well have booted,  but has some kind of display issue. As a first step have you tried re-writing the sd card with the Manjaro i3 that originally did boot and trying to boot from that?    IF that works you know it's a software problem...  

Also,  have you tried using the f2 key to turn up the brightness?  ..in case somehting in the update turned it down......

 I'm assuming you don't have a serial cable.  it's very helpful to have serial output at times like this.   You can watch the booting sequence and usually can see where the system is hanging or failing.  Often,  if its something like a software display problem, you can fix it....

Thanks for this - I tried both Manjaro i3 and Debian but same result. Will keep trying for a bit and then resort to console connection