Restarting difficulties

[Perl6_user]

I've had the PBPro for some months, and am generally pleased with it. The quality of the audio was unexpected, and it's now become my domestic audio streaming device.
However, when restarting, e.g. following an OS update, it frequently hangs, very early in the reloading process. (Blank screen, not even the circling indicator.) It seems to require one or more physical off/on cycles with the power switch before it will start to load the OS.
It would be easier to see what's going on with a "disk" (really bus) activity light, but that might be too expensive to implement.
Is this a known problem? Is there a fix?

[mamboman777]

I've had the PBPro for some months, and am generally pleased with it. The quality of the audio was unexpected, and it's now become my domestic audio streaming device.
However, when restarting, e.g. following an OS update, it frequently hangs, very early in the reloading process. (Blank screen, not even the circling indicator.) It seems to require one or more physical off/on cycles with the power switch before it will start to load the OS.
It would be easier to see what's going on with a "disk" (really bus) activity light, but that might be too expensive to implement.
Is this a known problem? Is there a fix?

Can you give more details of your system?  Are you running Manjaro?  Are you booting off of EMMC, SD, or NVME?  Does the problem persist if you boot off of the other devices?  (Is a restart successful on SD, for example?)

[Perl6_user]

> Can you give more details of your system?  Are you running Manjaro?  Are you booting off of EMMC, SD, or NVME?  Does the problem persist if you boot > off of the other devices?  (Is a restart successful on SD, for example?)

It's an ANSI keyboard, running Manjaro, essentially untouched since it came out of the box, (other than automatic updates). Presumably booting off EMMC, as I believe it was shipped that way. I haven't tried using any alternative boot medium.

Other than uname, (which output I don't suppose would provide anything useful in this case), are there any diagnostics I could run usefully?

[KC9UDX]

You *could* have an activity light at boot time if you or someone else writes a U-Boot that supports this. But the trouble is that you're not going to see anything useful, anyway. Because likely U-Boot has stopped with an error. You could see this with a serial console adaptor and another PC to act as a terminal. I recommend doing this. But, what might be more simple is just to switch to a different U-Boot. I've seen numerous reports of trouble with the U-Boot that comes with Manjaro.

[Perl6_user]

Could you point me at instructions for obtaining and installing a different U-Boot, please?

[KC9UDX]

Could you point me at instructions for obtaining and installing a different U-Boot, please?

How I do it is probably not the best practise.  I download a bootable operating system image that comes with a U-boot that I want to install.  I write the image to a micro-sd card, and dd from the start of the disk to the end of the first partition, to the eMMC.  I usually have to modify the boot partition to suit.

The package manager that comes with the operating system that you have might well have a better, easier, way to do this.