Brand new Pinebook Pro doesn't boot after Manjaro update

[johnboiles]

I need a fleet of low cost laptops for a factory floor and am evaluating the PineBook Pro.

I received my unit today, booted it up, set up the user account and was happy with how painless it was. Then the software updater in Manjaro said there were a bunch of updates available so I hit the button to update. The computer rebooted as a part of this process and now it will no longer boot. I get the power LED and nothing on the screen.

Where do I go from here? Are software updates on this thing generally a dicey proposition?

[KC9UDX]

From what I've seen, this only happens once. After you get it working, and keep it updated, it shouldn't be an issue.

In any case, all these problems only seem to happen with Manjaru.

Keep in mind that the power light doesn't really indicate "power on". It indicates that some software turned it on. So you can roughly determine at what point the boot process stopped. You *might* be able to make a bootable SD card and recover the system from there. At least some versions of U-Boot that come with Manjaru do not allow you to boot that way. But it's worth a try; you should have a bootable SD card for emergency boot purposes anyway.

You can find bootable images in the wiki. The one I've used successfully for this purpose is DietPi.

[ss_pbp]

Same thing happened to me today.

Brand new unit, pacman - Syyu, now the power light comes on and nothing else happens.

I don't have a SD card lying about, so it's bricked for me.

[KC9UDX]

The ultimate fix for this would be to ship the Pinebook Pro without an operating system installed. But this would force everyone to have a micro-SD card solution anyway.

Really, this is a hobbyist computer and needs other resources to support it. The minimal support resources would be a micro-SD card and a way to write an appropriate image to it.

If I needed an array of laptop computers for a specific purpose, I wouldn't hesitate to use the PBP. This is based on my experience using them. I use NetBSD on both of mine, but I do have Manjaru on my wife's. I did have to struggle with the default Manjaru installations. But once I got them up and running, I haven't had any issues since. And I do thrash my PBPs with NetBSD pretty well.

I actually thought of this yesterday, being at a contesting station with four networked laptops for collaborative logging. Except that the specific software running required Windoze, I couldn't help thinking how much better four PBPs would have been, especially seeing the admins struggle to get them going after power outages.

[dachalife]

I completely agree with you there.

I’ve got back-up micro-SD cards for each device with their best working versions, then another folder in Syncthing with my customizations, modifications & files, so there’s always a backup copy on my server for each one during testing (for when I break something); it just makes life so much easier.