The 6 most common reasons why Pine64 won't boot

[rahlquist]

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, its a long thread so I may have missed this, I note there are issues with 2Gb and Ethernet so this may well be what I encountered. Though it seems backwards to the advice given!

I had issues booting Debian on a 2Gb machine, it appeared to hang after 17secs of boot..this was strange, I tried burning a copy of remix, it fired up, so felt my board was ok. I then tried again with Debian on a different 16Gb card and it worked......hmmmm odd, since my cards are all valid and work fine.

The only thing different was that I plugged in my Ethernet cable when remix was up....so I tried to boot Debian again on the 8Gb, without the network

Sure enough it seemed to hang at 17secs.........but when I plugged the cable in, it actually responded with a notice the cable had been connected, so clearly it wasn't hanging, 20 secs or so later, it booted to the Debian 8 log in screen

So...I reset again this time with cable in, and it fired up in about 30secs....

Without the cable, it will fire up, but takes 2-3 mins before it boots up, giving the impression of a failure to boot.

I hope this is helpful.

This is not the experience I have had with any of the current linux images, so it is a bit premature to call this a new Ethernet bug.  They all boot fine with Ethernet connected with no lags. Is it possible your DHCP server is slow to respond? Especially since each fresh OS install on the Pine generates a new MAC? Maybe you ran out of reservations?

Just a thought.