05-23-2020, 02:05 PM
(05-23-2020, 08:33 AM)jimsurvak Wrote: Hey belfastraven,
I apologize for being away for a few days, things got expectantly busy for me. Thank you for the suggestions! I'm afraid I don't have a serial cable nor ever used one (not entirely opposed to learning, however). I pulled the eMMC, flipped the switch again, and pressed the reset button. I've got a microSD card with Fedora on it & tried to boot. The power light came on and flashed green, very rapidly, for 15 or 20 seconds before turning solid green. It remained solid for maybe another minute before going out. Nothing showed on screen after that. I know Fedora can take a while to boot, 4 minutes or so, so I left it for about 10 minutes and there was no visible activity. I pulled out the microSD card, went through the same steps again, but this time the power light didn't come on again.
I'm afraid I don't know what SPI flash is, so I don't recall explicitly interacting with it. I've installed Manjaro 19.10 xfce on the eMMC, but that's it. So unless that's touched SPI flash I'm afraid I don't know how else it would've been interacted with. Or if Fedora on the microSD card touched SPI flash, but I never installed that to the eMMC (not sure if that's relevant at all).
Thank you again! If there's any other ideas you can throw my way I'd appreciate it.
I think this pretty much shows that this is not a power problem. The reason I suggested using a serial cable (you plug one end into the audio headphone jack on the pbp, flip the use serial switch on the pbp , plug the other end of the cable into a usb port on your computer, and then run a program like minicom (if you are on linux )--
like e.g.
sudo minicom /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 1500000
and then when you power on the pbp, you will be able to see the initial u-boot messages, log into the system if it boots, check to see if there is a kernel panic, whatever.
The reason I suggested you remove the EMMC, and flip the switch to NOT use the emmc and press reset was to make sure that machine wasn't trying to do anything with it; If it has somehow gotten corrupted, there may be problems even in booting from an SD card.
Perhaps you could try a different distribution, e.g. a Manjaro 20.04, just the one running off of the SD card. You might also check to see if you can find what the blinking green LEDS mean in the Fedora distribution for the pbp. Different distributions use different color/flashing leds for various purposes. You might get some info that way.
Do you have an adapter so that you can write to the EMMC directly from your computer? If not, you might want to think about getting one. They are very inexpensive and make it easy to fix problems on the EMMC.