[solved] T2 OLinuXino LIME2 no longer booting after first update

[unicorn]

https://ibb.co/v3QN4S1

Image of boot screen, this just flashes up, then just goes to black. The green LED never lights up, device seems to just shut itself down.

At first I installed to eMMC (boot with SPI), after doing 'sudo apt update', 'sudo apt upgrade' and rebooting, the device never starts back up.

Suspecting that it may be an issue with using eMMC, I attempted just using the SD card I bought with my device (A20-DEBIAN-SERVER-SD), but even when booting from SD card, running update and upgrade causes the device to not boot again.

Help would be greatly appreciated, I would like to know what is causing this and how I may recover since I do not want to randomly lose all my data upon updating :/

EDIT:
Exact device: T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-e8Gs16M-IND Rev.K2

[LubOlimex]

Performing "apt upgrade" probably broke the image. This happens because in the list of sources for upgrade, there are both olimex and armbian sources which are no longer 100% compatible. You need to disable the armbian one for now.

As a workaround, in a new image, before performing "apt upgrade" edit the armbian.list with:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list

and comment out (with #) or remove this line:

deb http://apt.armbian.com bionic main bionic-utils bionic-desktop

Then try the upgade again.

[unicorn]

Yes, it must have been 'apt upgrade', because there was nothing else I had done at that point 

I will attempt your workaround after work today, but I have to ask, why is this workaround not applied by default in the images you provide, especially the SD cards, which people pay for expecting them to just work?

I did not find any instructions indicating there may emerge problems upon upgrading, it is basic functionality and it just made the purchase of the Debian SD a waste of money because I will have to end up flashing a new image anyway upon immediately breaking it :/

So please, if this is a known issue, address it in the images/SD Cards you provide or at least provide information about it.

[unicorn]

Another question, will disabling this repository mean that I do not receive updates that would be relevant to my system? Or does one of the other repositories/Olimex repositories provide for this?
I would prefer to run my server with not just a workaround, but a working solution

[LubOlimex]

You'd still receive updates. The Olimex one would still be enabled.

It can be accessed with:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/olimex.list

and it contains:

deb http://repository.olimex.com bionic main

Edit: By the way, you are the second person to report something like this, but I can't replicate it. Using the latest official image, without any changes I performed "apt update" "apt upgrade" and everything works fine for me. No problems booting or with anything else.

[unicorn]

That's puzzling, perhaps the SD card or the image on it was faulty

Either way I will soon get home and look into it again

By the way, I assume you mean 'stretch' in my case, not 'bionic'?

[LubOlimex]

Oh maybe that is why we had different results. I tested with the ubuntu bionic image, since it is what people usually use (due to video and audio support).

[unicorn]

Perhaps it's worth trying it with the Debian Stretch image then, may shed some light onto what's going on

[unicorn]

I have tested again with the newest image, installed to eMMC with boot from SPI, and this time it did not break.

I want to note however, that the list of updates was smaller, perhaps because I have a newer version now than the one that was shipped to me. This may mean that the next time there is e.g. a kernel update, my installation will break again, which I do not want to have happening.

For this purpose, should I comment out one of the repositories even though it is working for now? I really do not want to risk losing data.

EDIT:
I also just remembered seeing two errors when initially executing 'apt update' with the SD card prepared by Olimex, something about some file or path not found. Unfortunately I did not note this down and I obviously don't have the image anymore since upgrading broke it and I had to flash one to the SD card myself.

[LubOlimex]

I also managed to test it and it behaves well here. We release updates relatively often and we update every card still at stock but sometimes the card that you receive might contain the previous release of image (if the change happened shortly after your order was processed).

Better comment out the armbian repositories.

Consider making offline copies of the card before performing "apt upgrade". "apt upgrade" is a well-known slayer of images of embedded electronics.