BPI-F3 not booting

Have you another SD card ?

I’ve had different results burning images. Try using Balena Etcher and let it do the verify after write.

Had a lot of issues with SD cards, they were really my fault they were so old they were on their way out. I bough some new ones and have not had a problem.

Also had issues burning with the raspberry pi imager compared to Balena. With my new SD cards I don’t have issues now.

Franco

Beside checking the sd card is not corrupted, maybe make sure you are powering the board with 12V. I used many SD and never had problems, but I’m using a 18W and 30W PD hub/charger.

I tried two different SD cards, one of which is new, and I get the same result with both.

About the power, I’ve tried both with a 12V/2A power supply and with a USB cable connected to the docking station. I’ll try to see if I can find something better.

BTW, I noticed that the “Getting started” page has a section “Solution for 2G DDR version unable to start” where it suggests to update the “ddr_cs_num” value to 1 in the eeprom via titantools. Mine is a 2GB version and so probably it needs the change. However, I haven’t been able to set the value until now, as the tool always reports a timeout.

Hi, When you do your DD command do you put a status=progress at the end? Have you tried with Balena Etcher?

Franco

Thanks to all for the suggestions, I have made some progress finally.

I’ve used a real Windows 11 machine (instead of a Windows VM on Linux with USB passthrough) and I was able to change the “ddr_cs_num” eeprom value to 1 via titan tools (as my board has only 2GB of RAM). I was also able to flash the bianbu image on the eMMC and now it boots properly.

I’m still not able to boot from the SD, as u-boot reports that no card is inserted (I tried two different cards):

=> mmc info
MMC: no card present
mmc_init: -123, time 1

I tried flashing both with Balena Etcher and dd (with status=progress), but it seems the board isn’t even detecting the card. I will investigate more.

Hi,

What you could try since you have access to the debug console is to boot via TFTP. I already have the commands written out so you can just copy and paste them in to your console.

Change the IP addresses obviously for your system.

setenv ipaddr 192.168.0.5 setenv serverip 192.168.0.2 setenv gatewayip 192.168.0.1 setenv netmask 255.255.252.0 tftpboot uImage bootm 0x80600000 bootm 0x80200000 0x82200000 0x82200000 setenv ipaddr 10.196.157.189 setenv serverip 10.11.143.218 setenv gatewayip 10.196.156.1 setenv netmask 255.255.252.0 enx4865ee115d98 sudo screen -L /dev/ttyUSB1 115200

You can find more info on my github here. BPI-F3/notes/ubootcommands at main · rcman/BPI-F3 · GitHub

Franco

here is the finished bootloader boot-20240727.tar.xz and here is the recording.
Also env_k1-x.txt

Okay let’s step back. Where are you downloading the image and which image are you issuing?

You should be downloading it from the link below.

Once you burn it to micro sd card it should boot. Make sure you download the name with img in the name.

Franco

there is a ready-made image with everything configured. there is a build system
here are the settings: one, two

Hi, after all the suggestion, the SD is not working yet. I am going to send the board back because it seems a HW problem.

Hi, Sorry to hear that, stupid question. When you insert the Micro SD card is does click when pushed in and bounce back from the spring?

Sorry I have to ask that question. Franco

Hello, I’m having a similar problem with my BPI-F3. While trying to write the emmc with the titanflash utility on Windows, I accidentally erased the eeprom. Now it will only boot an armbian image. With all other images, the green led remains lit and no activity. How could I recover the board? I tried to write the emmc with utility again, and after decompressing the image, the utility states missing files: fastboot.yaml, partition_universal.json and some other, for which I have no template. Any help would be appreciated.

you can try to boot from armbian or irradium download the bootloader boot-20241214.tar.xz and write it to eMMC:

dd if=u-boot-bpi-f3-header-sd-0k.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=512 status=noxfer  
dd if=FSBL.bin of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=512 seek=512 status=noxfer  
dd if=fw_dynamic.itb of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=512 seek=1280 status=noxfer  
dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=512 seek=2048 status=noxfer

or write bianbu image to eMMC

right now it’s not booting at all. I will try to get a uart->usb adapter tomorrow to see the debug output. The armbian image halts during boot so I have no access to a console.

you can simply switch to boot from the SDcard

I am trying to boot from sdcard. I have 4 different cards which I tried.

try the irradium image

tried it, does not boot. Maybe you could help with a compressed directory structure like this:

image

so I can try and flash it with titantools. I wrote 2 irradium images:

irradium-3.7-riscv64-core-banana_pi_f3-6.6.65-build-20241214.img.zst and irradium-3.7-riscv64-xfce-banana_pi_f3-6.6.65-build-20241214.img.zst, extracted with zstd and written to SD with balenaEtcher.

The boot switches are set as factory default to boot from SD (all off).

Thanks for your help.

LE: Bianbu 2.0.4 desktop and cli boot successfully from emmc, not SD card but there is no 5V for USB and peripherals after kernel loading. Armbian “2024-06-14-Armbian-bpi-SpacemiT_24.5.0-trunk_Bananapif3_sid_legacy_6.1.15.img” boots from sd card and displays: ldo5: disabling and halts. Still no 5V for usb. Could it be a faulty board? The usb’s worked when I first started it with Fedora and Armbian.

you could also give this image a try if you like: Release 240521-01 - experimental debian sid image for the banana pi f3 riscv64 sbc · hexdump0815/imagebuilder · GitHub … on my 4/32gb bpi-f3 it boots fine from sd card and provides usb power …