Rock Pi X Wont POST

Yes, ive connected two devices and both light up. ive tried a keyboard but no numlock light which i would expect with a reset.

Hm, inactive numlock is not good thing. You tried USB 3.0 for this, correct?

yes, USB 3.0 external HDD and sitck. Keyboard was in 2.0 port. will try the keyboard again to see if i can get the BIOS. any suggestions are appreciated

Try keyboard in usb 3.0 port

Yeah tried that, no NumLock and can’t get the BIOS to show. Guessing the BIOS isn’t happy. Can the BIOS be bridged like ATX boards to force a settings reset?

No, HDMI output is one thing, but not having numlock is bad… At last i can advice you this

Thanks, tried but nothing. Just seems unresponsive. The force reset does nothing but dim the LED. I’ll contact the supplier and looks for a refund/replacement.

Thanks for your help

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Wait, dim led is what we need. led is dim when bios is starting, so try

Insert keyboard – start clicking del
Do full reset until led will dim
Do a few (30-50 sec) more Delete clicks
Then do F4-enter-F5-enter

Sadly, I have the same issue. Tried all of the suggestions. If any new suggestions come up, please let us know.

Same problem here, just received the board and started it up, everything went fine and the UEFI shell was displayed. Rebooted into the BIOS and changed some power management settings and boot device, after saving and restarting I have no HDMI output anymore. The led stays bright even after waiting a few minutes and will only dim when pressing the power key on the board for about 5 seconds.

Tried the blind reset trick but for me this is also not working, also no numlock and there does not seem to be power on the USB ports because the led in my optical mouse does not work.

Too bad there is no way to simply reset the bios. After only 15 minutes owning this board I already managed to brick it and is now an expensive paper weight ;(

I also ran into it. :frowning: ( Resetting the BIOS )

Not just me then. I’ve sent mine back to the supplier as faulty as I also lost the EFI shell so couldnt do anything even if the BIOS was ok.

It concerns me that the BIOS has not been customised for this board to stop any settings being applied that causes it to not boot. Having to flash it each time with a special tool is a no go for me.

The next revisions of the board needs:
Add an easier manual BIOS set option, pin jumper reset
Modify the BIOS to remove unwanted settings
ACHI boot support for a wider range of OS setups

For now I’m waiting for a refund and then buying something else. Shame as this board had so much potential.

Your problem seems to be different then the one I have with the Rock Pi X. In my case the blue led stays bright and would not dim, even after waiting a few minutes. I also noticed that the power led which should be green is very dim with an orange like color. There still seems to be some form of activity because the heatsink becomes warm after some time and when I press the power key for about 5 seconds the blue led dims.

I ordered the bios programmer set which will arrive in a few days and try to resurrect the board. Hopefully that will work, if not I will sent it back and order another x86 board.

exactly same to my rockpiX, I tested all usb ports with my little usb fan and the usb3.0 port is the only port has power, but when i plug the keyboard there was no led light.
I am not sure did the rockpiX recognize my keyboard, tried the blind f4-enter-f5-enter combo few times but no luck
thinking about order the BIOS reset tools

I got it working again :smiley: Had to use my Jetson Nano for it because that is the only Linux machine I have with easy accessible USB ports… After this I changed the exact same settings in the BIOS as before (when the board died) without any issue. Don’t know what caused it.

Process was simple, followed the steps as described on the Wiki.

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@Peter_H84
I ordered the CH341a Programmer and it seems same to yours. I am using Windows and I downloaded the BIOS binay(SPI Flash Image) from wiki and I have no idea which program should I use.
Will it be easier to flash the BIOS on linux?
I know it sounds silly, should I just connect everything (The 1.8v adapter) and open up the command prompt, and input the command

Blockquote
sudo flashrom --programmer ch341a_spi -w ROCKPI_V12_X64_20200821.bin

Is it how that works?

Thanks everyone

I used Linux because that was the only OS described on the Wiki and I could simply use the mentioned command there.

You first need to install flashrom when not already available (just try to execute the command), I needed to compile it myself because there was no binary available for the platform I used.

I used the command on the Wiki and for me that worked the first try.

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Finally I flashed the bios successfully and got my rock pi X working again.
I flash the bios with WINDOWS 10 and there are few tricks I would like to share for those who may need.
I download the driver and the program from the official website wch-ic.com

  1. There is a “Detect” button at the top of the program, but even you click the button you still have to manually select the storage size of the chips and it should be 8MByte/8MBit. Otherwise you can still flash the bios, it will still popup successful message but actually doesn’t

  2. Sometime the program shows incorrect connecting states. I was struggling for a while. I erase and read the chips to confirm the program actually writing the chips before writing the bin file into the chips.

  3. At last I finally write the bin file into the chips, plug in power and hdmi, and I noticed the rock pi Logo flashed like 0.1 sec then the screen go black. I unplug and plug the power and keep clicking del, was successfully boot into bios, select restore to default and my rockpi X seems to work again.

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Hi All,

So an update to my issues, sorry for the novel but here goes…

I sent the board back to the supplied as i don’t have the tools or knowledge to do the BIOS flash.
The report back was the the CPU has burned out due to an over voltage issue that was blamed on the USB charger. Now i used a PD compliant USB3.0 charger from a £1000 Toshiba laptop and not some knock-off one from eBay/Amazon so this left me confused. Its 9v to 20v rated with variable options

Thinking back to the time i was looking around the BIOS to see what i could to to reset other than the default to kick the EFI shell back in to life and i do recall in the BIOS is a setting to enable a ‘Turbo’ feature in the CPU section. Now i don’t beleive i enabled this but lets say i did (even though i set the defaults back and rebooted but flicking around and making a wrong key press is easy). At that point it died and got the no POST issue.

Now putting my detective hat on i feel that the setting drew more power/amps/volts than its rated to (maybe it does not support Intel turbo features) and fried the CPU. This would be regardless of the charger as the board is getting what it needs and is regulating it but the BIOS allowed the CPU to draw more. Now im not an electronics expert but this is my logical conclusion…happy to be corrected or advised as to what else may have caused it. By the way, i had this charger on the board for days before this possible BIOS setting change with USB HDD’s connected so highly doubt this is the case.

My first impression of the BIOS was that there are too many options for a board of this type such as PCI-E x16 config that has not been removed…why have them if the hardware is not present on the board. Anyways i suspect this or another option being turn on has caused it but awaiting further testing to find out.

Basically learn from me…DO NOT enable the turbo feature on the BIOS and hope to what ever god you subscribe to that Radax tunes this BIOS down to remove all potentially dangerous settings not just the annoying ones that need a BIOS reflash. If Radax is reading this please optimise the BIOS to stop these types of issues.

Depending on the report next week i will update as its good to share this experience if nothing else.

Speak soon

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