How to boot from MicroSD to erase eMMC

#21

I use an HDMI monitor. I currently have no way to create a serial connection to the board.

I was finally able to erase the eMMC. The rkdeveloptool is very unreliable for me. I tried rebooting after that (assuming the system would realize it couldn’t boot from eMMC) and it still didn’t boot from SD. I was then able to flash the bootloader and then the .img file to eMMC. After unplugging power and then powering the board back on (with no SD card inserted) it still didn’t boot. I’ve tried on two different HDMI monitors.

I’m now going to use a different MicroSD card to ensure that the card is not part of the problem. If that doesn’t work I’ll have to return the N10 for a refund. It should not be this difficult to get the thing to boot.

#22

You can find them on Amazon for fairly cheap. Sure it’s not common but you can find it. Same with the Serial Console so you can debug why it’s not booting.

#23

I just bought a 128GB SanDisk Extreme, flashed it with rockpin10_debian_buster_xfce4_arm64_20200106_0710-gpt and then tried booting with it. Still nothing. And I’m now also back to not being able to erase the eMMC. It gives me Starting to erase flash... and then there’s no progress.

If nobody at Radxa can help me here I’m going to request a refund. It’s too bad, too, because if this experiment worked out I was going to buy dozens of N10s. This has been a very disappointing and frustrating experience. In a way I’m glad it happened because it revealed the level of support provided by Radxa.

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#24

I just used that image myself to flash my RockPi N10 using a Male to Male USB Cable and it booted fine. If there is no output on the screen you will need to hook up the serial console to determine why it cannot boot.

If you need the male to male it’s 8.19$ here at Amazon Male to Male USB 3.0 and you can get the USB to serial cable here.

I can try and reproduce your problem but I won’t as from what I can tell that image is hardcoded to boot off of /dev/mmcblk0p2 which is the onboard eMMC. So if you want to work on /dev/mmcblk1 you will need to fix up the image before flashing it.

So if you have access to a unix system you can mount the image this way. You can get the offset by running this: You’ll want the EFI partition as that is the boot partition.

root@rockpin10:~# fdisk rockpin10_debian_buster_xfce4_arm64_20200106_0710-gpt.img -l     

Device                                                       Start     End Sectors  Size Type
rockpin10_debian_buster_xfce4_arm64_20200106_0710-gpt.img1   32768 1081343 1048576  512M EFI System
rockpin10_debian_buster_xfce4_arm64_20200106_0710-gpt.img2 1081344 5859341 4777998  2.3G Linux filesystem

Then you can mount it this way

mount -o loop,offset=$((32768*512)) rockpin10_debian_buster_xfce4_arm64_20200106_0710-gpt.img /mnt

From there you can update boot.cmd for example and like in the bottom of the file it says you’ll need to recompile it.

If this works you may need to double check before rebooting to make sure the hardcoded settings are updated to the right device for you as this image makes a lot of assumptions.

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#25

Thank you, @smlikens. I just ordered the USB to serial cable. Once it arrives I’ll try the things you suggested. I already had the male to male USB-A cable. I’ll update here once I’ve given it a try.

#26

I am having the same issue. I was using Fedora 28 on microSD card and it was booting properly. When I burnt Debian using dd command to eMMC none is booting now. I will wait until @zigguratt tries with the USB to serial cable.

By the way what is the logic of male to male USB A? Why can’t I use male USB A to USB C?

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#27

I connected my MacBook Pro to Rock Pi N10 over serial console. It was showing blank screen.
Then I have to remove/attach power cable to Rock Pi N10, I was able to see some garbled text. I found I need to set 1500000 baud rate. Now It started booting buster in the eMMC. But it was trapped into infinite loop so that was the problem. I hit the reset button and it booted successfully. I was able to login. One more thing, we should not attach any wifi dongle or sd card since it was stuck to find driver or trying to find boot loader from sd card.

UPDATE: Another findings, when already booted into buster from eMMC, insert sdcard and try hitting reset button, it would boot from the sd card.

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#28

@zigguratt Can you try hitting reset button once or twice after 30 seconds when booting from eMMC?

#29

Only because USB C seems to confuse most people.

#30

I’ve given up on the N10. I’ve never had such issues with any other SBC. I have two Jetson Nanos, a NanoPC-T4, an UP Core, and I’ve used Raspberry Pis since the beginning.

I did get the serial connection going and saw output from the N10. I pressed the reset button in various states. Sometimes it would actually boot from the eMMC, but on reboot it would go back to the infinite loop, not even starting the kernel, which required pressing the reset button. It had lots of trouble booting from the SD card. I tried three different cards all freshly flashed with Buster from the Radxa site. I cannot even think of trusting this thing to boot on its own.

The rkdeveloptool was completely inconsistent when I tried it with the male to male USB cable. Sometimes it would flash the eMMC, other times it failed to find it, yet other times it started the process I requested and then just froze, I left it for hours in one case. Pathetic.

Just for reference, I’m not a newbie to this area or any other in computing hardware and software. I started programming in assembler on an Apple ][ in 1979. I’ve written languages, including a Forth interpreter for the Sinclair ZX81. I currently work as a developer in the blockchain space.

Sadly, I’m moving on to to other hardware. Thanks to everyone in this thread for the help. I would have expected more help from the Radxa team.

#31

Yes I agree. Although, it is booted from the eMMC and SD card by pressing reset button at random but the behavior is not consistent and actually nobody would like it. I guess hardware is fine, it just needs fixing the startup/bootloader.

#32

I am sorry for your bad experience. Which model of your N10? I think we figure out the issue. The image for model A(3GB CPU ram) is different from model B&C(4GB CPU ram). If the images are mixed, it will have random ram issue. The download link was not clear before. We will make sure each images are uploaded for model A and B/C.

#33

Please choose the suggested system images from here (https://wiki.radxa.com/RockpiN10/downloads) for ROCK Pi N10 Model A/B/C (https://wiki.radxa.com/RockpiN10/hardware/models).

Here are some guides for flashing the system images.

#34

So the only Linux distribution available for the Model A at the link you provided is Fedora Desktop? The saddest part is that I bought the Model A by mistake. I didn’t see until it was too late that the A only makes 3GB RAM available to the CPU. But I was willing to give it a shot.

And that’s when my nightmare began. I’ve moved on to other hardware now. When I get a chance I’ll possibly revisit this issue. Perhaps by then there will be more than just the Fedora distro available.

#35

I also would like to have a Debian or Ubuntu distro with Tensorflow 2 support. I used Fedora but it is very slow for some reason. I hope Radxa should start working for better software support now if they want their products should be usable in real world.

#36

I used Fedora but it is very slow for some reason.

Which part is slow? The Fedora is the official supported OS by Rockchip, it’s optimized for rk3399pro.

#37

I feel it is slow in comparison of Debian. May be it’s my own opinion. But of course I would prefer Debian or Ubuntu for development.

Also, the NPU development is based on TensorFlow 1.10 which is outdated.

\

#38

“Which part is slow? The Fedora is the official supported OS by Rockchip, it’s optimized for rk3399pro.”

Is that a joke? Your images expecially Fedora works very pourly and slow !!! so SLLLLLOOOWWWW…

#39

Where did you read that joke?

#40

upgrade_tool: Write LBA failed!

If this error occurs, try again:
. / upgrade_tool ul ‘Rom/RK30xxLoader(L) _VX. XX. bin’
then other write operations.