The Armbian unofficial 24.5.0 provided in the Banana Pi M7 documentation boots after flashing the microSD card, and I got through the setup procedure on the serial console. Once I booted the system, I performed an apt update && apt upgrade, and it worked fine. Then I rebooted the device, just to find out that it fails to boot.
It turns out upgrading the package linux-dtb-legacy-rk35xx breaks the boot procedure. I’m not certain why this is happening, but I wanted to share this, hopefully useful information.
Why don’t you use official builds from Armbian? Unofficial are not supported, are here only that you have something to boot. When sharing problems, make sure to provide all data that is possible to gather and at right place. Even with that its often difficult to fix problems.
This image is literally the only one that booted successfully on the Banana Pi M7. All other images that I found by reading the board documentation were either “not found” or failed to boot the bootloader, or failed to boot the kernel. I created other forum posts for some of these failures, and I wanted to share the information to reduce the frustration of other people booting this board.
I tried the 20W USB-C power supply that came with the board, and I also tried with a 30W power supply. I didn’t see any differences in booting results.
