Experienced and solved a few issues with the Pine A64 LTS. It might also be useful for another Pine style single board computer that is similar.

1. Power supply issue

If you are using a USB power source make sure you have enough voltage being delivered. I found a cable had a voltage drop to 4.6V and the board refused to boot. If you can’t test with a multimeter try finding the shortest cable you have and playing with multiple power supplies. I managed to get it working with one of my USB power supplies before I upgraded to having a dedicated power supply that delivered 5.2V. Not had power issues since.

2. ‘env.txt’ is invalid or there are invalid settings

a) Don’t use wordpad

I felt silly when I found out. I happened to be borrowing a PC and used wordpad to edit the env.txt file, it saved the file with ASCII encoding and it should of been in UTF-8 and so it was erroring and not booting with no signs as to why.

b) Make sure the settings are correct

I needed DVI compatibility mode enabled for one of my monitors for it to work. It was already there in the text file and simply needed to be uncommented.

3. Wait a little longer

First boot takes a while (about 1 minute) but I noticed the screen turns on but remains blank while it is booting, I find this usually indicates it is at least doing something compared to the situations where it errors above.

4. Reformat the SD card

For a while I had a power supply where if I jogged it a little it would cut out. This corrupted the SD card pretty often and required reformatting to get the device to boot. This also fixes issues when it things that should be working start stop responding. Most likely your data on the SD card has gone bad.

PS: I’m not sure if it was a placebo effect or not but if I tried reformatting and it still didn’t work. I formatted the SD card with another image and then my image again and it seemed to fix the issue.

NOTE: I haven’t tried using EMMC yet however after the issues with my SD card I want to give it a try and If I do end up using it I’ll add a note here on how it goes.

bogdandrema at gmail dot com
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