S905X T95N 1GB/8GB Won't Boot

1st Official Post

    Hello, I had posted this question inside another thread but I found it better to create a dedicated one, so I can provide the maximum information possible in one place.

    I have a T95N S905X P212 1GB/8GB Chinese box.

    The stock firmware is "T95X Amlogic S905X 4K KODI 16.1 Preinstaled Android 6.0 TV BOX Firmware 20160921"

    The "LWJ-NOGALIVE-T95N1G-8189-1112" and "P212 MXQ Pro S905X T95X 1G Android TV Stripped" both also work, and I'm currently using the Stripped one.

    I've tried all LibreElec and CoreElec builds available for the S905X with all the DTB variants, putting them on the root of the stick and renaming to dtb.img as instructed, and they all have the same behavior: The boot logo (S905X logo) appears, then fades to black, then nothing.

    I did a cat /proc/device-tree/amlogic-dt-id to confirm and the result was:

    gxl_p212_1g

    But the corresponding included dtb file doesn't work.

    I've left the box on for hours and nothing happens. The box doesn't connect itself to the network (Ethernet) so I can't ssh to it. I've tried to boot using 4 different SD cards and 5 different USB pendrives.

    I dumped my dtb.img from the android firmware in the box using dd if=/dev/dtb | gzip > /storage/downloads/dtb.img.gz and tested the extracted dtb.img, and when I put it on the USB stick it freezes on the boot logo, it doesn't even fades to black. I've tried splitting it, since it's a multi DTB, and using the individual ones but I still get the frozen boot logo, doesn't even progress to the black screen like the others. I'm attaching them.

    The latest ARMBian, "Armbian_5.37_S9xxx_Debian_stretch_3.14.29_icewm_20171226.img", works ok but it gives me a lot of emmc errors on boot. I'm attaching the DMESG log as well.

    I've tried all the DTB's included on the ARMBian image on LibreELEC and Core but they all go the black screen route.

    Thanks for the help!

    • Official Post

    From what you have explained (and a very detailed report it was) - you have tried everything that is possible. Either your box is not supported, a firmware upgrade is needed or there are internal (emmc) problems.

    As it doesn't work properly on ANY OS, there has to be another issue. By rights, LE with gxl_p212_1g should work on just the SD card.

    Quote from Iridium

    From what you have explained (and a very detailed report it was) - you have tried everything that is possible. Either your box is not supported, a firmware upgrade is needed or there are internal (emmc) problems.

    As it doesn't work properly on ANY OS, there has to be another issue. By rights, LE with gxl_p212_1g should work on just the SD card.

    Thanks for the answer!

    I don't think it could be a EMMC problem as I'm trying to run from an external drive and if I flash an android image on it it works perfectly?

    Also, ARMBian gives some erros but boots and works.