My PBP starts up like a 1977 Chevy Nova
08-28-2021, 11:33 AM
Hello everybody.
My PBP has this aggravating problem where on a cold boot it will randomly crash. It goes like this: I push the start button, I get the boot light, and then it often boots all the way to the Manjaro login screen. Sometimes I can log in. Then it freezes up. Sometimes the screen turns black.
And sometimes it doesn't make it that far. Sometimes it freezes and goes black in the first few seconds. When that happens, sometimes the boot light blinks green and orange.
The only solution is to hold down power until it is fully off and try again.
Now, here's where it reminds me of my Dad's rusty old Nova he had when I was a kid: If I do this a few times eventually it will stay on and run fine. For hours even. It has all the feeling of that old Nova turning over, turning over, coughing, sputtering, starting, stalling, starting, and then once it's going and warmed up, running like a champ. (My dad kept driving that car well into the late 1990s.)
This is only with power connected. It seems worse trying to start on battery. And booting off the emmc.
Before you ask me to try a different OS and boot from SD, I'll tell ya that the SD reader hasn't worked since the Pine folks replaced the keyboard. (See this thread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14232).
And also I'm being lazy about re-flashing the emmc, because this feels, once again, like a hardware problem to me, not Manjaro.
I can't help but feel like I kinda got a lemon of a PBP. Though maybe I'm just not giving credit, and like Dad's Nova, it will keep running poorly longer than most machines run at all.
Totally open to trying any suggestions though.
Thanks!
My PBP has this aggravating problem where on a cold boot it will randomly crash. It goes like this: I push the start button, I get the boot light, and then it often boots all the way to the Manjaro login screen. Sometimes I can log in. Then it freezes up. Sometimes the screen turns black.
And sometimes it doesn't make it that far. Sometimes it freezes and goes black in the first few seconds. When that happens, sometimes the boot light blinks green and orange.
The only solution is to hold down power until it is fully off and try again.
Now, here's where it reminds me of my Dad's rusty old Nova he had when I was a kid: If I do this a few times eventually it will stay on and run fine. For hours even. It has all the feeling of that old Nova turning over, turning over, coughing, sputtering, starting, stalling, starting, and then once it's going and warmed up, running like a champ. (My dad kept driving that car well into the late 1990s.)
This is only with power connected. It seems worse trying to start on battery. And booting off the emmc.
Before you ask me to try a different OS and boot from SD, I'll tell ya that the SD reader hasn't worked since the Pine folks replaced the keyboard. (See this thread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14232).
And also I'm being lazy about re-flashing the emmc, because this feels, once again, like a hardware problem to me, not Manjaro.
I can't help but feel like I kinda got a lemon of a PBP. Though maybe I'm just not giving credit, and like Dad's Nova, it will keep running poorly longer than most machines run at all.
Totally open to trying any suggestions though.
Thanks!