Bricked my Rock64

[Z80]

...anyhow....if someone can point me to the precise image tThat should recover my device....I will be beyond grateful.  I went so far as to trying to set up a dev environment in Ubuntu to communicate directly with the Rock64 via USB....but I got nowhere.

On the raspberry pi header, link pin 20 to 21. In other words, connect pin 21 to ground. If you have corrupted the SPI Flash bootloader, this will let you boot from the microSD card again. If you boot from eMMC, this will not be needed, as eMMC has the highest boot priority (eMMC -> SPI Flash -> SD).

If you are then able to boot your rock64 again, you can either erase the flash and forget about this, or write the flash bootloader again, and hopefully write it properly this time.

How recently did you try this? I've had problems with images made in the last two weeks..., so won't use anything newer than 0.6.27.

Thanks for the info!  I'll give it a shot.  It's been a long time since my Rock64 worked....late February?  I was foolishly trying to roll an Armbian-Jessie build for myself....and anyhow...I have a habit of messing tech-related things up lately....just spent more than a few hours building a full Debian Jessie Desktop for the Odroid XU4...using very detailed instructions...and a nap in between..heh....only to find out that I could log in....but when I created my root password.....I somehow typed it incorrectly.....twice!!!     omg...they have to make idiot proof systems....more idiot proof...LOL.  No clue about grounding pins, but I'll look around....


Thank again!

Most password reset instructions for linux involve using Grub or a Live Session or Recovery CD/DVD/USB to boot the system into single user or root mode.

These won't work for SBC's but hopfully the old standby method of mounting the microSD or eMMC in a card reader on another Linux box will let you recover.

The Linux machine doesn't have to be anything fancy, a Raspberry Pi will do.

Just plug in the reader and mount your main EXT4 partition (this may happen automatically) then edit the passwd and shadow files in the  folder on your mounted media, which will me mounted under something like /media/pi/my_disk_name/etc (depending on your user and linux version on the box doing the editing)

Just make sure you are editing relative to the /etc on your mounted media and not the root /etc on the machine you are doing the editing on ! (otherwise you will erase the root password on that machine, which is a HUGE security risk).

You may need to login or su to root on the system doing the editing before it will let you access the passwd and shadow files in the /etc folder of the externally mounted media, but that won't hurt anything as long as you make sure you are in the right folder as noted above, but it may be safer to just edit the files by opening a terminal and editing the files with a sudo nano command like:

sudo nano /media/pi/my_disk_name/etc/passwd or sudo nano /media/pi/my_disk_name/etc/shadow

(substituting in the terminal command the actual path to where the mounted files are on your system)

Then just edit the root entry line in the /etc/passwd file for your mounted media to look like:

root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash


And then also edit the root entry of the /etc/shadow file on you mounted media to be:

root::::


Then properly save the files, unmount the meda from the card reader, and replace it in your Odroid, and reboot, and you should be able to log in as root with no password.


After logging in as root you will IMMEDIATELY want to run:

passwd

... which will ask for and set an initial root password.

Hope this helps.