Rock 3A Won't Booting, because installed bootloader to MTD

#1

I recently purchased a Rock 3A with 2GB of RAM . Here’s my setup:

  • OS : Armbian Bookworm (installed on an SD card initially).
  • Installation : I later moved the system to an SSD using Armbian config , hoping to boot directly from the SSD. Unfortunately, that didn’t work.

As a workaround, I installed the bootloader on the MTD flash while keeping the system on the SSD (connected via a Penta SATA HAT ). However, the system suddenly crashed and shut down. Upon restarting, I encountered an error message like this:

error
error.jpg1280×720 110 KB

I’ve tried:

  • Booting with a fresh SD card (still no success).
  • Using a USB-to-TTL adapter , but PuTTY only shows unreadable/garbled characters .

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

#2

I have also a 2GB ROCK3A and in my experience, the ROCK3A is not stable when its power is 5V. I power it with my own 12V power wires, soldered to a USB-C connector.

However, it you use the SATA HAT (I don’t have) it can be powered via the 40-pin GPIO header and that is 5V. So that raises a red flag, also your kernel dump looks like same sort of rather random as I saw various times when powering with 5V and various Armbian images.

And that also might be the next issue: You need to tell what version it is about. The MTD (= SPI connected flash-storage) can contain an older version that does not recognize the SATA chipset or something is wrong with PCI-E. That happened a lot with my ROCK3A.

You can disable the SPI by putting a jumper in place, see wiki for ROCK3A howto do that. Than with a latest Armbian image with mainline base U-Boot and mainline kernel, you should be able to boot from SATA/SSD. The U-Boot is then on SD-card, but it would be in SPI-flash works as well and that is what you want.

If you have an old or unknown U-Boot version in the SPI-flash, you need to put newer mainline or the original latest Radxa one in there. So remove jumper, boot with correct image on SD-card and overwrite SPI flash with correct U-Boot (what you want). If you can’t ge it booted with SPI enabled remove HAT. If still not, then MASKROM mode via USB cable, see wiki.

As said, my conclusion is that this is and/or will be unstable because of power architecture. I use the a M.2 E-key slot for having SATA. Dual JMB chipset works (booting from with mainline U-Boot), also the Radxa breakout board works when SATA overlay is used. Works even better on ROCK5B (UEFI v1.1 in SPI-flash).Also ASM1166 in M.2 M-key should work, I have not tried that with ROCK3A, but works with other SBCs. You are the forced to do power 12V and 5V yourself, maybe too complicated for you, not for me as I have enough old PC power and SATA cables.

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#3

I think I have found the problem. Suddenly, I was able to boot into my SBC, but it recommended running fsck. I let the system perform fsck for over 20 hours, but it still didn’t finish, so I eventually interrupted fsck. After that, I turned the Radxa Rock 3A back on, but it lost the boot device located on my SATA SSD. I tried using a flash drive with a different image, but the system wouldn’t detect the flash drive—it only kept looking for the SSD. Is my assumption correct?

#4

I cannot conclude what the core problem is. That fsck should not last 20 hours at least, it means more that it crashed and did not show anything. You need to check the issues I mentioned earlier.