I’m attempting to follow the docs, but the IMG has no partition table. And doing a hexdump and strings and other things looks like there aren’t filesystems.
I’ve attempted to dd the image directly, I’ve attempted to use balenaEtcher (which warns me the IMG has no partition table).
I attempted to do it as a full zip and attempted to decompress it and try different of the images in there.
I’ve also attempted to gain access to the serial port, but I don’t know if the hardware will show anything without an OS and I can’t get it to connect serially. That totally could be me though, I’ve never connected to a board like that over serial.
Yes, serial is the fallback, although if Armbian boots you should be able to see it on the network. Do you know what IP address it gets on your LAN? Try nmap to see if port 22 is active.
If you’ve never done serial, you connect a USB serial port to three pins on the board (GND, TX, RX). The tricky part is that your USB dongle TX has to connect to the RX pin on your board, and vice versa.
When I plug it into the network it gets an IP address. I just get connection refused when attempting to ssh to it. I haven’t tried nmap, but I could try that to see if anything is even open. I didn’t know if the Armbian image had ssh disabled or enabled by default so maybe I needed to edit the files on the filesystem?
But when I connect the usb to serial I connect GND, TX and RX and tried flipping TX and RX in case they were backwards or something. Nothing. I hit enter on my laptop and I see the USB Serial light up as if it’s attempting to send, but the board never answers.