Pinebook Pro not powering on
#1
Hi, I have a problem I hope that I hope someone out there can help me with. I love my Pinebook Pro and it's a nightmare without it!

I was performing updates and screen went black. No power light. It was on 94% battery when I started. Initially I thought that it went to sleep but it wasn't waking up. I eventually tried to hard power off by holding the power button down for several seconds and trying to power it up again. There was no lights or anything.

Charged for several hours with the Pine Power, could see the amps draw run down to 0 and charging light went off.

Tried powering on, nothing.

Followed the wiki and read some other forum posts and tried the following.

Resat the eMMC, tried again, nothing. No power light, no response.
Switched the eMMC switch (24 on diagram) off and on again, still nothing.
Unhooked the battery, connected pass through, nothing.
Whilst battery was unhooked, tried it without an eMMC and put a fresh SD Card install of Manjaro. Still nothing.
The Pine Power was showing an amp draw when powering on without the battery though, so it does appear to be doing something. It went from 0a to 0.2a when initially powering, up to 0.5 as it is left on. No lights on board and not even a flicker of the monitor though.

Trued a USB-C monitor too but it's not turning on either.

What could be the problem and more importantly, how do I fix it?!
  Reply
#2
>Unhooked the battery, connected pass through, nothing.
I bet you did this in less than 1 min
Sometimes, the cpu can get into a 'bad' state, and because there is a battery, remember it
For example, try to boot with a a64 sd, you will think you have bricked it
So.... a hard reset with internal button or long press (pwr button, 20+sec)
OR disconnect battery 1+ hours
You may have to disable/remove emmc
I have had pbp go to sleep during an update, it is always a pain,
so I use systemsettings5 to make the sleep time very large, then set it back
  Reply
#3
We need a better way to get this information out, a "sticky" or something big and bold at the top of the Wiki, or something.

First, the "power" LED does not actually indicate power on; it is turned on by software. So, a PBP can be locked up in a power-on state and seem powered off. This is actually pretty common.

Second, don't rush to use the bypass cables. This is dangerous, and doesn't seem to be fruitful in diagnosing this problem.

Third, you must hold the power button for at least twenty seconds to assure a complete power-down.

Fourth, if your eMMC no longer boots, you will need to either remove it, or disable it with the hardware switch, to get other devices (preferably micro SD) to boot.

Fifth (and it seems you averted this), it is common to have to recover from a full battery discharge by charging via USB-C.
:wq



[ SRA accepts you ]
  Reply
#4
A sticky would be good
You are confusing a hard power-off and a hard reset, they are not the same
hard power-off takes a ~7sec press, this should always be tried first
(since if it works, the cpu was NOT in a 'bad' state)
Do be sure to press 1+ sec to start, a quick tap is not enough
  Reply
#5
Hello, sometimes, after power on, my PBP turns on the orange led but the operating system does not start.

After several reboots (with hard power-off ~7s press), the operating system ends up starting normally.

What can it be? Do you have any idea how to avoid this unwanted behavior?
Pinebook Pro, standard config (Manjaro)
  Reply
#6
It's probably a slightly "off" uboot, manjaro has done this before
You could get a serial window on the uboot process, flip the headphone switch
and make/buy a serial connector.  But you still have the problem---what uboot??
You don't want to take my advice, I won't use a uboot/kernel that does NOT have "good" sleep
So I am stuck with mrfixit's uboot and 5.8.14,,, this gives 10+ days sleep
To experiment, get some (more than 1) small uSD (2GB from phones ideal),
put your present uboot on it (&fix mbr table), make a fs on the rest (uboot in 1st 16M,,32768 sectors)
(as so... dd if=/dev/emmc of=/dev/sd bs=1M count=16,,, then fix mbr table on sd)
copy emmc mbr(1 sector, the 1st) to this fs (that you just made on sd), then blank 1st 16M on emmc
(as so....dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/emmc bs=1M count=16 ,,, change /dev/emmc to appropriate)
Then copy original emmc.mbr back (to emmc)
So, the boot rom finds nothing on SPI, nothing on emmc, finds idbloader on sd, loads uboot on sd
Since the sd is mostly blank, then uboot looks for the next in its boot_target list, finds emmc
(with the right files) and boots it
On any other 2 GB uSD, try other uboot packages
Whe you find one that works well, copy it to emmc, then copy original emmc.mbr
The reason for a fs on the 2GB, uboot (IIRR) gets a bit pissy if it tries to read a fs and can't
By doing it this way, you may not have to take off back (of pbp)
After all, most SBC run from the wall, not from batteries
Mine is still set up this way, still haven't found a better uboot than mrfixit (not looking that hard)
-----
You could also look at dmesg to see if anything obvious....dmesg|less
  Reply
#7
(11-17-2021, 11:58 PM)wdt Wrote: It's probably a slightly "off" uboot, manjaro has done this before
You could get a serial window on the uboot process, flip the headphone switch
and make/buy a serial connector.  But you still have the problem---what uboot??
You don't want to take my advice, I won't use a uboot/kernel that does NOT have "good" sleep
So I am stuck with mrfixit's uboot and 5.8.14,,, this gives 10+ days sleep
To experiment, get some (more than 1) small uSD (2GB from phones ideal),
put your present uboot on it (&fix mbr table), make a fs on the rest (uboot in 1st 16M,,32768 sectors)
(as so... dd if=/dev/emmc of=/dev/sd bs=1M count=16,,, then fix mbr table on sd)
copy emmc mbr(1 sector, the 1st) to this fs (that you just made on sd), then blank 1st 16M on emmc
(as so....dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/emmc bs=1M count=16 ,,, change /dev/emmc to appropriate)
Then copy original emmc.mbr back (to emmc)
So, the boot rom finds nothing on SPI, nothing on emmc, finds idbloader on sd, loads uboot on sd
Since the sd is mostly blank, then uboot looks for the next in its boot_target list, finds emmc
(with the right files) and boots it
On any other 2 GB uSD, try other uboot packages
Whe you find one that works well, copy it to emmc, then copy original emmc.mbr
The reason for a fs on the 2GB, uboot (IIRR) gets a bit pissy if it tries to read a fs and can't
By doing it this way, you may not have to take off back (of pbp)
After all, most SBC run from the wall, not from batteries
Mine is still set up this way, still haven't found a better uboot than mrfixit (not looking that hard)
-----
You could also look at dmesg to see if anything obvious....dmesg|less
Thanks for the input.

I've lef this unpowered for a few hours with the battery disconnected.

Switched the UART switch over and plugged the serial cable into the headphone jack but nothing has come up in the terminal.

Also resat the eMMC for good measure (again), switched it off and tried another fresh install on SD as well.

Still nothing coming out of this, I'm going to raise a support ticket to see what they say.

Thanks again for your help, I'll keep this thread open for a bit longer to see if anyone else can suggest anything.
  Reply
#8
(11-19-2021, 02:59 PM)wantageek Wrote:
(11-17-2021, 11:58 PM)wdt Wrote: It's probably a slightly "off" uboot, manjaro has done this before
You could get a serial window on the uboot process, flip the headphone switch
and make/buy a serial connector.  But you still have the problem---what uboot??
You don't want to take my advice, I won't use a uboot/kernel that does NOT have "good" sleep
So I am stuck with mrfixit's uboot and 5.8.14,,, this gives 10+ days sleep
To experiment, get some (more than 1) small uSD (2GB from phones ideal),
put your present uboot on it (&fix mbr table), make a fs on the rest (uboot in 1st 16M,,32768 sectors)
(as so... dd if=/dev/emmc of=/dev/sd bs=1M count=16,,, then fix mbr table on sd)
copy emmc mbr(1 sector, the 1st) to this fs (that you just made on sd), then blank 1st 16M on emmc
(as so....dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/emmc bs=1M count=16 ,,, change /dev/emmc to appropriate)
Then copy original emmc.mbr back (to emmc)
So, the boot rom finds nothing on SPI, nothing on emmc, finds idbloader on sd, loads uboot on sd
Since the sd is mostly blank, then uboot looks for the next in its boot_target list, finds emmc
(with the right files) and boots it
On any other 2 GB uSD, try other uboot packages
Whe you find one that works well, copy it to emmc, then copy original emmc.mbr
The reason for a fs on the 2GB, uboot (IIRR) gets a bit pissy if it tries to read a fs and can't
By doing it this way, you may not have to take off back (of pbp)
After all, most SBC run from the wall, not from batteries
Mine is still set up this way, still haven't found a better uboot than mrfixit (not looking that hard)
-----
You could also look at dmesg to see if anything obvious....dmesg|less
Thanks for the input.

I've lef this unpowered for a few hours with the battery disconnected.

Switched the UART switch over and plugged the serial cable into the headphone jack but nothing has come up in the terminal.

Also resat the eMMC for good measure (again), switched it off and tried another fresh install on SD as well.

Still nothing coming out of this, I'm going to raise a support ticket to see what they say.

Thanks again for your help, I'll keep this thread open for a bit longer to see if anyone else can suggest anything.

Also had the same problem and have tried similar things. I was installing Manjaro, shut down to take out SD card and now I have no signs of life. I’ve tried all of the above steps including building without EMMC installed nothing. 

Left battery disconnected over night and when I plug back in, board warms, no lights, no screen… retry all resets still nothing. It won’t boot off SD card without eMMC installed either. I don’t have a serial cable… anything else? This seems bricked
  Reply
#9
(11-20-2021, 12:47 PM)Andrewjneumann Wrote:
(11-19-2021, 02:59 PM)wantageek Wrote:
(11-17-2021, 11:58 PM)wdt Wrote: It's probably a slightly "off" uboot, manjaro has done this before
You could get a serial window on the uboot process, flip the headphone switch
and make/buy a serial connector.  But you still have the problem---what uboot??
You don't want to take my advice, I won't use a uboot/kernel that does NOT have "good" sleep
So I am stuck with mrfixit's uboot and 5.8.14,,, this gives 10+ days sleep
To experiment, get some (more than 1) small uSD (2GB from phones ideal),
put your present uboot on it (&fix mbr table), make a fs on the rest (uboot in 1st 16M,,32768 sectors)
(as so... dd if=/dev/emmc of=/dev/sd bs=1M count=16,,, then fix mbr table on sd)
copy emmc mbr(1 sector, the 1st) to this fs (that you just made on sd), then blank 1st 16M on emmc
(as so....dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/emmc bs=1M count=16 ,,, change /dev/emmc to appropriate)
Then copy original emmc.mbr back (to emmc)
So, the boot rom finds nothing on SPI, nothing on emmc, finds idbloader on sd, loads uboot on sd
Since the sd is mostly blank, then uboot looks for the next in its boot_target list, finds emmc
(with the right files) and boots it
On any other 2 GB uSD, try other uboot packages
Whe you find one that works well, copy it to emmc, then copy original emmc.mbr
The reason for a fs on the 2GB, uboot (IIRR) gets a bit pissy if it tries to read a fs and can't
By doing it this way, you may not have to take off back (of pbp)
After all, most SBC run from the wall, not from batteries
Mine is still set up this way, still haven't found a better uboot than mrfixit (not looking that hard)
-----
You could also look at dmesg to see if anything obvious....dmesg|less
Thanks for the input.

I've lef this unpowered for a few hours with the battery disconnected.

Switched the UART switch over and plugged the serial cable into the headphone jack but nothing has come up in the terminal.

Also resat the eMMC for good measure (again), switched it off and tried another fresh install on SD as well.

Still nothing coming out of this, I'm going to raise a support ticket to see what they say.

Thanks again for your help, I'll keep this thread open for a bit longer to see if anyone else can suggest anything.

Also had the same problem and have tried similar things. I was installing Manjaro, shut down to take out SD card and now I have no signs of life. I’ve tried all of the above steps including building without EMMC installed nothing. 

Left battery disconnected over night and when I plug back in, board warms, no lights, no screen… retry all resets still nothing. It won’t boot off SD card without eMMC installed either. I don’t have a serial cable… anything else? This seems bricked

Played around more. After disconnecting the battery overnight, removing EMMC, reconnecting battery and connecting barrel plug charger, board would start to heat up as if it were on. Held down power button for 20+ seconds, disconnected power reconnect to power push the power button at now boots to SD card.

It seems the CPU was locked and the eMMC was also faulty. Manjaro-arm-installer does not seem to be writing correctly to eMMC
  Reply
#10
On occasion I have had to the 20+s push more than once,, maybe I didn't hold long enough?
I have had to do it more than 10 times, FWIW
AND, if there is a bad uboot package, it MUST be removed,, ie pull emmc
I highly recommend mrfixits' distro, do update it (the mrfixit update), as a fail-safe recovery
Put it on an old slow small card
  Reply


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