Rock 4c+ fails to boot

#1

I’m new to this and have just brought a Rock 4c+. I have set it up as per instructions. I’ve flashed the image to the sd card, made all the appropriate connection, inserted the sd card in the socket, turn the power on and all I get is the green light on the card. I do get two messages on the monitor “No video connection “ and “Enter sleep mode “, which is just a monitor message. Any suggestions?

#2

It will behave like that if it can’t find anything to boot from or some weird (unknown) card is used.
UART console probably will return nothing here,

  • unplug everything except power and sd card
  • get yet another card to try
  • double check sd card contacts as well as rock socket
  • burn image again,
  • try different image/distro/kernel
    It should boot into system, ethernet should get status lights when cable is connected (try)
    hdmi support may be broken on some releases (or incompatible with Your monitor)
#3

Thanks for your reply. I used a new Verbatim card but it took a long time to do the flash on etcher, about 80 minutes. A bit excessive. I’ll redo the card on an different computer and see how that goes. Do I need to reformat the sd card before I try again.

#4

Please replace the card first to verify the hardware.
And if the hardware is ok, then format the card, and burn the system image to the card again. 80 minutes is extremely unreasonable.

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#5

Those are rather cheap, poor cards. I seen only few cards that were not working on some slots, some uses edge protocols to get bit better speeds, some were just poor or counterfeit cards. I also have few cards that works perfectly on pi and are not detected on Rock series. This is mostly easy to debug, i.e by booting from eMMC and trying to mount such card.

#6

I’ve tried a Scandisk and it seemed okay. It got through the first part on etcher and right to the end of the verify then I got an error - “ Something went wrong. If it is a compressed image, please check that the archive is not corrupted. Error spawning the child process”. I assume the image is compressed but l’m not sure how I check the archive and what the child process is.
Any ideas

#7

This does not matter.
You may have one device that work with particular card,
and other that will not even detect same card.

Just get good quality card, it will save You for lot of problems now and later.

This indicates read & verify problems. If You have poor card it won’t even work correctly even if detected.
Image is compressed if extension is .xz or .zip/.gz, You may use something like 7-zip to verify or unpack image to .img file (also supported by balena).