Hi all,
My bpi R4 is suddenly not booting properly, it turn on with red and blue light, with lan 3 green light on and both SFP and 12v power for the WiFi card lights come on, however it doesn’t boot, if I put my serial adapter on I get nothing or plain garbage, if I press reset it goes into initramfs recovery
If I put the dip switch to nand the ethernet light goes off
You can check if it’s a problem with this device. Its R4 seems to be somewhat similar to your situation.
He has different symptoms from what I see, he has red and green light, mine is red and blue, only boots to recovery mode if you press reset
No overheating on that bucket regulator, doesn’t even get hot, so I don’t see that as an issue
The y21c seems to be running in spec, produces similar numbers to yours
Tried that already, tried to switch storage media same issue
If you haven’t done so, try removing the BE14 card from the R4 mainboard. And test R4 standalone from there.
(be careful with your body’s electrostatic that might cause potential damage)
Tried that too lol, unfortunately it doesn’t do anything differently
lol. Sadly then likely some components damaged.
When you say “if I do the … trick it goes into initramfs recovery,” how do you confirm you’re in recovery mode?
I can access openwrt recovery luci
Pressing the reset button takes me to recovery too as I learnt
I can access openwrt recovery luci
Oh, I think your R4 hardware is mostly fine then. Little difference between recovery mode and “normal” from the perspective of loading the kernel.
Did you manage get connected to DEBUG port in recovery mode? Perhaps we can put this aside first.
Were you experimenting a custom kernel or loading a kerne that’s not vanilla OpenWrt?
Nope it was plain vanilla openwrt, no custom kernel and unfortunately uart still doesn’t work
If I recall correctly, the ip address of your R4 in recovery mode is 192.168.1.1. You can ssh into it if DEBUG port doesn’t work.
Then delete everything inside /sys/fs/pstore/* Then reboot, you’ll get into “normal” mode.
Given that said, a freshly burned sd card image should simply the whole process. But since you said it didn’t work for you, it’ll a little puzzling and the above procedure may still fail to get you in the normal mode.
Yeah I tried to delete everything in pstore but weirdly nothing is in there to delete
If there is nothing in /sys/fs/pstore, R4 will reboot into normal mode. If it can’t then very likely kernel panics while handling some hardware in booting normal mode. Though I expect something will be written to pstore, so that it triggers recovery mode.
Very weird in your case. Perhaps it has to do with the DEBUG port. Kernal can’t initialise it in early boot and revert back to recovery mode.
I would check on your R4 if any short circuits on the DEBUG port…
Yeah nothing,
imma just sell this kit off, if anyone’s interested feel free to pm me, I’ve bought an ubiquiti Dream Router 7, it’s not as powerful or customisable but at least it’ll be reliable and won’t die on me randomly
