Parallella Community

I have not been able to get my device to boot and have tried seemingly everything to get it to work. As far as I can tell, my unit should be using the 7010 files and no hdmi. I have burned the sd card 5 times using my linux machine and a windows machine with 2 different sd cards and it still won't boot. I have even tried using the hdmi kernel even though my unit doesn't have hdmi. I have looked in the rootfs partition of the sd card, but the log files don't seem to be getting written to. The log files that are present must be from the original unit that the image was made from. If I delete the log files, they never get re-created.
When I look at my router, I never see the MAC address of my unit. The 2 green leds light up and the ethernet lights both light up and blink. I don't have a serial cable to look at the boot output. I suspect something is failing very early in the boot process, since nothing is written to disk. This has been very frustrating as I have successfully done this same process with 3 other similar devices (rasp pi, banana pi) and I've never had a problem with the device not booting. That is why I felt confident getting the headless unit, as I would just ssh into it, but obviously that is not possible since it never gets an IP address. Hopefully someone can help, otherwise I guess I''ll see if I can get another unit (but I really don't think it is a hardware problem). Any ideas? Thanks.

Can you try replacing the devicetree database which is located on the BOOT volume, with the one attached to .

Regards,

Andrew

I tried that. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. Still nothing.

Do you have a different manufacturer SD card you could try?

Also would be good if you could and see if at least U-boot is loading.

Regards,

Andrew

I've tried using a SanDisk card and a Kingston card. Both don't work. I will have to buy a cable for connecting a terminal. I guess I'll have to wait a few days to see if that sheds any light on the matter. Thanks.

So, I received my serial cable and plugged it in. There appears to be a problem with the device not being able to read the sd card. I get the message 'Card did not respond to voltage select! ** Bad device mmc 0 ** '. I have tried with 2 different sd cards. Could there be a problem with both? Or, does this indicate a problem with the board?

I just recieved my board and would like to share my experience.

My package did not have a micro-sd included so I purchaced a Samsung 32 G EVO.
I had some trouble finding instructions for installing the large heatsink so I relied on my own experience and installed it. Turned out fine.

The problem started when I tried to populate the micro-sd and boot. Nothing was happening. No video; no ethernet. I did not have a serial cable so I took out the micro-sd and examined the logs logs /var/log/{dmesg; boot.log and syslog} on a regular Linux box.

I tried several methods:
*) initially tried using gparted and copying the files. That did not work and I was unable to boot at all.
*) Next I tried several images with "dd".

In all instances I fixed the networking and the rules and set up the right mknod all as per instructions.

What finally worked was getting the new devicetree database and booting without: keyboard; mouse or monitor. That immediately fixed the problems and my board is runnng now. I suggest before getting a serial cable that people try the new devicetree database since that may very well solve the problems and save you additional trouble.

Please make sure you are not overloading the power supply. Is the power supply properly rated? Are you using too many usb devices through an unpowered hub? You can always measure the voltage on the micro-sd using a multi-meter.

I'm using the power supply that came with the board and I don't have anything else plugged into it.