Intermittent Boot Issues

[MrRoosevelt]

Greetings

My girlfriend and I both got our PBPs in last week. Out of the box I had issues with mine not booting properly.

I got the Manjaro setup process then on reboot, I got the orange to green led sequence but no back light on the screen. After a few power cycles I was able to boot into Manjaro. Every other power cycle the issue returns though. I can do a hard poweroff and power back up and it fixes the issue; though, it sometimes takes 3 or 4 power cycles to fix the issue. There seems to be no relation between power connectivity across boots as I have read in other posts on this forum. I have also tried switching ttys and trying to reboot through the serial console, as if the screen were just blanked, which was also fruitless.

I'm running the PBP as shipped from the factory; though I did allow Manjaro to do a system update once it finally booted.

My girlfriend's PBP, on the other hand, is behaving quite nicely. 

I'm not sure where to start with debugging this. It looks like a hardware issue given that its not happening on both PBPs; but, I don't want to rule out the possibility that the Manjaro setup script botched something. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[Solution]

The solution as mentioned by @khanku is that there are bugs in Manjaro's build of UBoot.

There is a uboot build in this git repo: https://github.com/mrfixit2001/updates_repo/tree/v2.0 The v2.0 branch targets PBP. There is a script in the directory pinebook/filesystem called mrfixit_update.sh. The script is smart enough to determine the target drive for writing the uboot image. I didn't want to install the kernel and other stuff, so I borrowed the script and made some redactions to fit my needs.

This may not be the best way to handle it; but, its what I did to get moving:

Code:

DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"
SYSPART=$(findmnt -n -o SOURCE /)
       
if echo $SYSPART | grep -qE 'p[0-9]$' ; then
  DEVID=$(echo $SYSPART | sed -e s+'p[0-9]$'+''+)
else
  DEVID=$(echo $SYSPART | sed -e s+'[0-9]$'++)
fi
       
if [ -f $DIR/idbloader.img ] ; then
  dd if=$DIR/idbloader.img of=$DEVID bs=32k seek=1 conv=fsync
fi

if [ -f $DIR/uboot.img ] ; then
  dd if=$DIR/uboot.img of=$DEVID bs=64k seek=128 conv=fsync
fi
       
if [ -f $DIR/trust.img ] ; then
  dd if=$DIR/trust.img of=$DEVID bs=64k seek=192 conv=fsync
fi

I ran these commands one at a time; but, some return value checks on dd and better placement of file existence would help automation.