A20 Board doesn't boot

[martinayotte]

It is possible that there are some cold soldering broken.
On one of my board which was working for more than a month, I got the same problem reported during boot time.
Upon suggestion from Olimex, I've heated the DRAM chips with a hair dryer/blower, it fixed it for about 2 weeks, but then it failed again. I've sent the board back to Bulgaria for repair. I'm still waiting for it. Fortunately, I've some other boards to continue my development.

[lorenzownd]

Tried with the hairdryer but still no success. I think I'll send the board to Olimex, but I have to be sure it's an hardware problem.

[anton]

My A20 broke down yesterday evening. Received it end of May. Worked with it abt. a month. It just did not start up after putting a new image in the microSD. I reprogrammed the microSD with a copy of de original Debian image (got wiser during the years :-)), but no boot. Tried another microSD, other image. Same symptoms as described above: red led continious, no other leds, no signals, no display. Voltages 5, 3.3, 1.5 and 1.2 are correct. Booting Android from NAND goes ok. So the suggestion that e.g. connection with the microSD socket broke is probably right. What tot do?

=> see solution post 20/7/2014

[gschaden]

Same problem here, I have a A20-OLinuXino-LIME-4GB

I tried with
https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-boards/raw/master/sys_config/a20/a20-olinuxino_micro.fex

And also with OpenEmbdedded (daisy)

Is the problem in the uboot or in the fex file? Is this a problem of the activated nand?

[anton]

 
Found out what it was/figured out a work-around. The backup image was written on a micro-SD card with FAT32 formatting (with SDformat). After reformat (under windows) to NTFS and SD image copy (with ImageWriter)the image turned out to be bootable. Twinkling LED's and all.

So: no SD card socket error, no RAM, no nothing. Just the correct format of the micro-SD card......

[lorenzownd]

My board arrived a few days ago. It was a cold-soldering problem, so Olimex repaired it and shipped it back. Now I'm running Arch Linux ARM with latest sunxi kernel and XFCE.

[gek]

Just received my board yesterday and I am facing the same issue. 

Red led next to power and never a Green one. Tried the Nand boot, android on an SD and Debian on SD.  Weird thing is I do see stuff happening on the UART.  I say stuff cos I am using an rs232 connection and not a UART based USB so all of it is jibbirish, but it does look like it booting something

Ordered a TTL USB and hopefully I should get an answer as to why my HDMI does not receive anything...

Asides from that the board looks really really cool!