Rock 5a turns on green led but doesn't boot

#1

This is my 2nd rock 5a (pink edition, in case that matters). I flashed it with the same OS image as my first rock 5a, I have the same connector and power supply as the first unit, so I know they should work fine.

Unfortunately, when I plug my rock 5a to the power supply, all I get is a green led and nothing else. I can turn it on/off with the button, but besides that it seems totally unresponsive. I’ve tried several things, connecting it to the mac directly through usb-c and the system doesn’t detect it. I’m going to give up soon on this if I can’t make it work.

Any clues as to what could be the issue? Thanks.

#2

What OS are you trying to boot?
What kind of memory are you trying to boot from (uSD, eMMC, NVME)?
How long had you waited for it to boot?
Are there any other things plugged in other than power, video and peripherals?

#3

Hi @stardust, thanks for your reply.

I’m booting from a microSD card, tried 3 different ones. One, is the exact same microSD that I used to boot my first rock 5a, so in theory it should work.

I tried 3 different images. Typically, I use this ubuntu distro https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip. I also tried a couple of the distros in the rock 5b docs. I didn’t try any official Radxa distros, as I downloaded one from the webpage, tried to copy to the microSD with balena etcher, but apparently the image was corrupted. I figured that the image probably was not the issue.

I tried booting by connecting a USBC cable to my macbook pro, and also to a power supply which I’m fairly confident should work.

I did not wait too long for it to boot.

First, I was running with the NVM hat, but then removed absolutely everything, even the fan, and tried booting that way. Still nothing.