The 6 most common reasons why Pine64 won't boot

[psychedup]

We recommend the Samsung evo plus cards... much faster, more reliable.

Thanks Mark. I'll order those and see how that will work out for me. A different simple question. If I closed the LCD ABS enclosure there is no decent way to get in right? With those clips.

The 'hack' we are recommending for that is to take a very small dremel bit and drill a paper-clip sized hole at the location of each tab.  Then to open the case simply push a paper clip into the hole(s) to pop the tab loose.  Some folks tried melting or burning a hole ( not recommended ).  The dremel tool is your friend... if you don't have one try to borrow one, but a dremel is kinda like a soldering iron... every shop should have one.

I do own a dremel and this is not a bad suggestion at all. 6 of those tabs is then still not easy I believe... :-)

I'm thinking of throwing away the lids to my ABS enclosures. Every time I snap them on I end up wanting to get back in there for something.

[ChrisG]

It's still not booting regularly. More then half of the time I get the white stripe screen. I spend way too much money on this board for it not to function. Appreciate if one of the moderators or experts (MarkHaysHarris777?) of Pine64 can give some definitive tips and suggestions to rule out other issues. When it runs it performs better on the Samsung Evo card. However when playing around with it, e.g. connecting to WiFi, browsing, testing the occasional app. It freezes for a while or indefinitely and then the white-striped screen comes. Rebooting does not resolve the issue at all then. Appreciate the help here.

[MarkHaysHarris777]

It's still not booting regularly. More then half of the time I get the white stripe screen. I spend way too much money on this board for it not to function. Appreciate if one of the moderators or experts (MarkHaysHarris777?) of Pine64 can give some definitive tips and suggestions to rule out other issues. When it runs it performs better on the Samsung Evo card. However when playing around with it, e.g. connecting to WiFi, browsing, testing the occasional app. It freezes for a while or indefinitely and then the white-striped screen comes. Rebooting does not resolve the issue at all then. Appreciate the help here.

This sounds like the board is malfunctioning. Please confirm, are the white stripes on the LCD 7" display, or are the white stripes on the hdmi display ? 

Are the stripes in the 'same' position horizontally?  (or do they move around from boot to boot)

Can you try another pine board with the same display?  Do the stripes follow the board, or are they persistent on the display board ?

Vertical stripes are usually indicative of a bad display board, interface connector, or bad ribbon. More often the not the stripes are the result of having a defect in the display itself; not on the computer board producing the image !

I of course cannot reproduce your difficulties; although, I am sorry.  You might like to open a support ticket and perhaps your board can be replaced; however, it would be nice if you can narrow down whether the striping is the display proper, or the pine board-- some further diagnostics will be helpful.

[ChrisG]

It's still not booting regularly. More then half of the time I get the white stripe screen. I spend way too much money on this board for it not to function. Appreciate if one of the moderators or experts (MarkHaysHarris777?) of Pine64 can give some definitive tips and suggestions to rule out other issues. When it runs it performs better on the Samsung Evo card. However when playing around with it, e.g. connecting to WiFi, browsing, testing the occasional app. It freezes for a while or indefinitely and then the white-striped screen comes. Rebooting does not resolve the issue at all then. Appreciate the help here.

This sounds like the board is malfunctioning. Please confirm, are the white stripes on the LCD 7" display, or are the white stripes on the hdmi display ? 

Are the stripes in the 'same' position horizontally?  (or do they move around from boot to boot)

Can you try another pine board with the same display?  Do the stripes follow the board, or are they persistent on the display board ?

Vertical stripes are usually indicative of a bad display board, interface connector, or bad ribbon. More often the not the stripes are the result of having a defect in the display itself; not on the computer board producing the image !

I of course cannot reproduce your difficulties; although, I am sorry.  You might like to open a support ticket and perhaps your board can be replaced; however, it would be nice if you can narrow down whether the striping is the display proper, or the pine board-- some further diagnostics will be helpful.

On LCD:
1. I power up
2. Boot screen appears: A64 android....
3. 2nd screen appears
4. then the screen gives the vertical white-black stripes

So what to do... I can again retry to burn the image?

Chris

[MarkHaysHarris777]

It's still not booting regularly. More then half of the time I get the white stripe screen. I spend way too much money on this board for it not to function. Appreciate if one of the moderators or experts (MarkHaysHarris777?) of Pine64 can give some definitive tips and suggestions to rule out other issues. When it runs it performs better on the Samsung Evo card. However when playing around with it, e.g. connecting to WiFi, browsing, testing the occasional app. It freezes for a while or indefinitely and then the white-striped screen comes. Rebooting does not resolve the issue at all then. Appreciate the help here.

This sounds like the board is malfunctioning. Please confirm, are the white stripes on the LCD 7" display, or are the white stripes on the hdmi display ? 

Are the stripes in the 'same' position horizontally?  (or do they move around from boot to boot)

Can you try another pine board with the same display?  Do the stripes follow the board, or are they persistent on the display board ?

Vertical stripes are usually indicative of a bad display board, interface connector, or bad ribbon. More often the not the stripes are the result of having a defect in the display itself; not on the computer board producing the image !

I of course cannot reproduce your difficulties; although, I am sorry.  You might like to open a support ticket and perhaps your board can be replaced; however, it would be nice if you can narrow down whether the striping is the display proper, or the pine board-- some further diagnostics will be helpful.

On LCD:
1. I power up
2. Boot screen appears: A64 android....
3. 2nd screen appears
4. then the screen gives the vertical white-black stripes

So what to do... I can again retry to burn the image?

Chris

Yes, reburn the image.

... try using the 'Etcher' program.

Something else you might try is to zero partition your SD card with gparted, or fdisk; that is, remove all existing partitions on the card and re-write the partition table back out to the card... then try writing the image to the card with the 'Etcher' program,  or with dd;  either from a mac or gnu+linux.

This is the thing I find most frustrating about the pine community. Some individuals have inexorable difficulty with the burn process;  which makes no sense whatsoever. It either works or it doesn't and it has NEVER failed for me.... not even once.  not on hundreds of cards and multiple SBC(s) including three pine boards and a couple of dozen Raspberry PI(s).   (I just don't understand why this is so difficult for people)

[michele.bendazzoli]

I note that the MAC addresses of the 4 pine64 I had purchased are always the same i.e. 36:c9:e3:f1:b8:05. 
This may result in an address conflict with an already running device and potentially even the impossibility to startup the new pine64 device.
To solve the problem I change the MAC Address of all devices putting it in the /etc/network/interfaces file the following:

auto eth0
               ....
               hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

Hope this can help someone.

[ChrisG]

It's still not booting regularly. More then half of the time I get the white stripe screen. I spend way too much money on this board for it not to function. Appreciate if one of the moderators or experts (MarkHaysHarris777?) of Pine64 can give some definitive tips and suggestions to rule out other issues. When it runs it performs better on the Samsung Evo card. However when playing around with it, e.g. connecting to WiFi, browsing, testing the occasional app. It freezes for a while or indefinitely and then the white-striped screen comes. Rebooting does not resolve the issue at all then. Appreciate the help here.

This sounds like the board is malfunctioning. Please confirm, are the white stripes on the LCD 7" display, or are the white stripes on the hdmi display ? 

Are the stripes in the 'same' position horizontally?  (or do they move around from boot to boot)

Can you try another pine board with the same display?  Do the stripes follow the board, or are they persistent on the display board ?

Vertical stripes are usually indicative of a bad display board, interface connector, or bad ribbon. More often the not the stripes are the result of having a defect in the display itself; not on the computer board producing the image !

I of course cannot reproduce your difficulties; although, I am sorry.  You might like to open a support ticket and perhaps your board can be replaced; however, it would be nice if you can narrow down whether the striping is the display proper, or the pine board-- some further diagnostics will be helpful.

On LCD:
1. I power up
2. Boot screen appears: A64 android....
3. 2nd screen appears
4. then the screen gives the vertical white-black stripes

So what to do... I can again retry to burn the image?

Chris

Yes, reburn the image.

... try using the 'Etcher' program.

Something else you might try is to zero partition your SD card with gparted, or fdisk; that is, remove all existing partitions on the card and re-write the partition table back out to the card... then try writing the image to the card with the 'Etcher' program,  or with dd;  either from a mac or gnu+linux.

This is the thing I find most frustrating about the pine community. Some individuals have inexorable difficulty with the burn process;  which makes no sense whatsoever. It either works or it doesn't and it has NEVER failed for me.... not even once.  not on hundreds of cards and multiple SBC(s) including three pine boards and a couple of dozen Raspberry PI(s).   (I just don't understand why this is so difficult for people)

Hi Mark, I'll give it a couple of more tries but to be honest my faith is fading and I just wanted a nice SBC with a touchscreen. Even multiscreen. Anyways, I used Diskutil to erase/partition. And during the burn process with Etcher I pulled this from fdisk command.  


iMacChris:~ chrisgroenewegen$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk1
Password:
Disk: /dev/disk1 geometry: 7783/255/63 [125042688 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: 0B 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [     32768 -  125009920] Win95 FAT-32
 2: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused      
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused      
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused      

So it seems to me that there is only one partition right? btw I'm burning the 32Gb image now onto the 64Gb microSD. 

Regards,

Chris

[xleon]

I feel your pain - when my board boots it's very fast, it's just you can't guarantee it will boot each time.
Original PSU,no ethernet cable connected and no USB devices connected.

Tried with originally supplied SD card and with a genuine, fast SanDisk card.

Apply power and out of 5 attempts, it will boot once fully and work flawlessly.
The other four attempts it will flash the screen, then sit there doing nothing.

Surprised no one else is experiencing this issue apart from us two.

Updating to latest makes no difference.

[Fstkmaro]

It's still not booting regularly. More then half of the time I get the white stripe screen. I spend way too much money on this board for it not to function. Appreciate if one of the moderators or experts (MarkHaysHarris777?) of Pine64 can give some definitive tips and suggestions to rule out other issues. When it runs it performs better on the Samsung Evo card. However when playing around with it, e.g. connecting to WiFi, browsing, testing the occasional app. It freezes for a while or indefinitely and then the white-striped screen comes. Rebooting does not resolve the issue at all then. Appreciate the help here.

This sounds like the board is malfunctioning. Please confirm, are the white stripes on the LCD 7" display, or are the white stripes on the hdmi display ? 

Are the stripes in the 'same' position horizontally?  (or do they move around from boot to boot)

Can you try another pine board with the same display?  Do the stripes follow the board, or are they persistent on the display board ?

Vertical stripes are usually indicative of a bad display board, interface connector, or bad ribbon. More often the not the stripes are the result of having a defect in the display itself; not on the computer board producing the image !

I of course cannot reproduce your difficulties; although, I am sorry.  You might like to open a support ticket and perhaps your board can be replaced; however, it would be nice if you can narrow down whether the striping is the display proper, or the pine board-- some further diagnostics will be helpful.

On LCD:
1. I power up
2. Boot screen appears: A64 android....
3. 2nd screen appears
4. then the screen gives the vertical white-black stripes

So what to do... I can again retry to burn the image?

Chris

Yes, reburn the image.

... try using the 'Etcher' program.

Something else you might try is to zero partition your SD card with gparted, or fdisk; that is, remove all existing partitions on the card and re-write the partition table back out to the card... then try writing the image to the card with the 'Etcher' program,  or with dd;  either from a mac or gnu+linux.

This is the thing I find most frustrating about the pine community. Some individuals have inexorable difficulty with the burn process;  which makes no sense whatsoever. It either works or it doesn't and it has NEVER failed for me.... not even once.  not on hundreds of cards and multiple SBC(s) including three pine boards and a couple of dozen Raspberry PI(s).   (I just don't understand why this is so difficult for people)

Respectfully, that is an awful generalization. I don't think it is a secret that the Pine board and system has issues that baffle all but the most savvy like I would presume you are. Not everyone has the experience many of us had bringing linux and DOS boxes up from scratch :-). Anyways, I digress. 
I personally have issues with the board not booting. Funny thing is that I got mine through the kickstarter campaign and purchased the board, power supply, pre-loaded card with android, 7" screen and the playbox housing. My board shows no life either on the 7" screen or with a HDMI display that I have and is known working. The power supply that I received with my package did not seem to be of high quality so I tried using my iPad pro charging supply which has more than adequate capacity and no luck. So, in my case, the typical solutions I found here do not apply as all was brought from the factory. I write here looking for something I may have missed. My board is the 2GB board. Any help will be appreciated.

[pfeerick]

I would suggest that you do re-image your microSD card. Your best option for using the LCD with the pine64 at this time is an Android image. Give the ayufan's Android 6 image a go... and use Etcher to write it ... it will minimise your chances of having issues with image file corruption. There is a good chance your SD card has a image on it that only outputs to a HDMI monitor (if in fact there is anything on the image at all).