Rock 5B no longer boots

Hello, I ran into a big trouble. I did some experiment and moved the boot directory on the eMMc from which I was booting so far. This made the device unbootable. OK, this was expected. So I reverted the change and moved the boot directory back. My expectation was that it would boot again as normal. But it didn’t. So I inserted the SD card with the system that I know is bootable. It didn’t boot. I tried couple of other SD cards with other systems I was booting from when needed earlier. It still didn’t boot. Finally, as my last chance, I removed both eMMC and NVMe from the board and let only the bootable SD card in. To my big surprise it still didn’t boot. As well as it didn’t with all the other bootable SD cards I have. In all these mentioned attempts it do the same. Couple of seconds after powering on the light tuns in green and every second or so it quickly flashes in blue twice. There in no video out signal, nothing appears on the monitor.

I did not touch the SPI at all. If I remember well, it is already a year I was touching it the last time, it should be cleared as on the brand new device.

I really wonder why I am not able to boot with any of the bootable SD cards I have even if the eMMc and the NVMe are removed from the device any more. Is this really possible? I thought that booting from the SD card would be a fallback solution in any situation. Is this my wrong understanding? And most importantly, how do I force the board to boot again?

Many thanks for any ideas!

Can you monitor the board using serial console?

I think Your SPI is updated with image that boots from nvme/emmc, maybe try network boot,
like @incognito said - would be much easier to know what is going on with UART

Yes, there might be the NVMe/eMMc SPI. I will try to flash eMMc with the new Ubuntu image and will check whether it boots with it.

I hope I could try the UART way. I should have the adapter and the cable somewhere and just need to recall how to do it.

Thank both of you for trying to help!

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You can use the Rockchip tools in maskrom to access the SPI directly and clear it this way.

I made it alive again following this path.

Thx for the suggestion!

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