Since I don’t have USB cable to connect to SSD (to write image) I did following steps:
Wrote official Debian image to SD card.
Successfully booted Rock Pi 3A with the image.
Inside the Debian, I downloaded the same image(this time saved it in the device memory in the SD card).
Then used approach mentioned here:
sudo dd if=’ your image path’ of=’ your NVME SSD device path’ bs=1M
Even though instructions are from RockPi4 page, since it is OS related instruction, I thought that it should work fine with RockPi3 as well.
Then I removed SD card, and powered the device with SSD installed - nothing happened(no power).
Then I tried to power with both SD card and SSD installed - nothing happened
Then I removed the SSD and tried to power only with SD card - nothing happened
I rewrote fresh image to SD card and tried this way and again nothing happened.
Device is currently unusable. I noticed that the green led on SBC is not being powered as well. Though when I measure the input power on the board, I can see that 12V is present, so power is coming, but I guess not going further into the system.
According to the schematic POWER_LED is powered through SoC PMU, does it mean that issue is in PMU?
I didn’t write Rock 4 SPI flash image to Rock 3. In fact I didn’t do anything related to SPI flash(it is in its default state)
Furthermore, as I know, green LED indicator is not related to SPI flash. In my case green LED is not working. Can you confirm that green LED should flash even if SPI flash is not configured properly?
Also, the image that I copied with dd command was image for Rock 3, not Rock 4.
Mine board act like dead but it will start with no UART connection, eMMC and NVME, just SD card. I tried to clear SPI but still no luck getting UART back - it won’t start and no led. I have another rock 3A board and same set is ok on it. As far as I remember updating rockpi3a-rk-u-boot-latest or latest rk-kernel for 3A shows some firmware or SPI updating and problem started on next boot. I tried to clear SPI - but still I’m not sure if that was successful.
@jack - do we have any informations what firmwares can be updated on this board? Maybe it’s something else than SPI? I did not had so much time to reverse eng. those packages but more and more people experience those problems.
I believe PMU unit of SoC is fried. In GPIO, Vdd5 has 0V, Vdd3.3 has 0.4V.
I don’t know what else can be checked to verify it.
Is there a chance that when device tried to boot from SSD, some settings during boot led to electrical inconsistencies between SSD and SoC which caused the issue?
Maybe Linux on SD card can deal with SSD, while when device boots without SD card, SPI flash cannot handle SSD.
With right power adapter, cable and port mine is found on RKDevTools and it’s not when one of those is replaced to something else. Are You sure You tested whole set and it was working before? It’s just easy to make mistake here. In contrast to wiki on my computer it worked only with usb-c cable.
If something is fried usually You can easily smell that. I think something was updated with wrong version that stops boot process. As I said on my side UART, nvme or eMMC will do that and board is playing death - no reaction. Of course I cannot say I’m sure your is not damaged, just try more things to see if there is something that may worked before.
I’ll try to fix my board and compare everything to second rock3a I have. UART-less board makes everything much harder and I still would like to make it bootable from nvme.
Yes everything was working great. I was using Rock3 with SD card. Then attached SSD. Everything was still fine. I download image and then copied it to SSD as per instructions. Then shut down the system, removed the cable, removed SD card, and gave power back to see if it will boot from SSD, but since then device behaves dead: No power LED and the GPIO information that I provided you before. I am following official instructions to update SPI flash, but it says no device found(i have the yellow hat in place for the pins).
For Linux PC: lsusb shows: Bus 001 Device 049: ID 2207:350a Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Company
For macOS PC: lsusb shows: Bus 000 Device 004: ID 2207:350a Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd. USB download gadget
For Windows PC: Open RKDevTool and you would see "Found One LOADER Device".
If no device shown above, it might be a hardware issue.
I am a fan of Armbian. I think it may be more reliable when using Armbian to flash SPI.
Because flash SPI with USB cable in Windows OS is invalid.
(I did not learn English well.I’m a Chinese, so I write in Chinese.I have no choice.)
1.不建议通过USB数据线刷写SPI FLASH。因为不管是 Windows 还是 Linux 都可能会刷写失败。（尽管 rkdevtool 显示刷写成功，但实际上并没有刷写。）
2.建议直接在主机上跑Linux系统，直接对 SPI FLASH 进行刷写。（100%有效）