Having trouble booting all the images I try

Banana Pi SBCs design BPI-M2+/BPI-M2 Zero/BPI-P2 Zero(H3)
1

I just want to make sure I am doing this correctly. I download the image, extract the archive img, burn it to sdcard with etcher, plug it into the bpi m2zero, and when I turn on the power it should boot, nothing else to do, right? I have tried this with many different images but the only one that boots is the Ubuntu 19.10 image from avafinger. Is there something I need to modify within the image before burning or after burning? I noticed most have a separate boot partition with folders for different boards. Do I need to delete any of the folders that don’t match my board? I just don’t know what I am doing wrong.

2

Hello! Welcome to this forum! I want to make some things clear for you. I’ll write the steps right down here:

  1. Download Balena Etcher (etcher.io)
  2. Download your image of choice (for example: https://drive.google.com/open?id=14tsP-ctECFxFBsF7Lmuv_C-Bm7Xppl79 from BananaPi BPI-M2Z & BPI-P2 Zero(H2+) New Images Reapbian9.4 & Ubuntu16.04 Release 2019-04-30)
  3. If it’s a zip, you don’t need to extract it (Etcher will do it for you). If it isn’t a zip, but for example, a 7z-file, you need to extract it to a .img-file. You don’t have to touch the .img. Then you can flash it with Etcher.
  4. Be careful! Select and wipe the device you want to format (e.g. in Linux /dev/sdb). I recommend you to first change some settings in Etcher and the close and re-open it. The settings are (turn these on):
  • Auto-unmount on success
  • Auto-updates enabled (optional! If you want more control, just turn it off)

I would turn off:

  • Send error reports
  • Validate write on success (it costs more time and if you do it the right way, then it isn’t needed)
  • Maybe it’s going wrong this step: Trim ext partitions before writing (raw images only)
  • Unsafe mode (Dangerous)
  1. That’s all! You don’t need to delete files or modify. You can edit files before booting (changing hostname etc.). But never touch boot files if you don’t know what you’re doing!!!

By the way! The board picks automatically the right boot folder, so it’s okay there are multiple boot folders.

I hope it’s now clear for you!

mhog