install LE on DEAD A95X MAX V81

    any help how to install LE on my bricked A95x F3 air? its got a s905x3 processor,the box is recognized by the computer usb but the flashing ends up with errors.

    I tried burning the stock image on sd card and LE image on usb but the box doesnt even boot.

    ,could you please help thank you

    • Official Post

    scarface911 If the flashing via Amlogic Burning Tool gets further than 10% complete the emmc likely has enough of the Android image installed to have restored vendor u-boot, and from that point you should be able to use the AMLG12 image with SEI610 or VIM3L device-trees - both are S905X3 devices, or maybe even the U200 or X96-max devices trees (set the dtb name in uEnv.ini). If not, I'd need to see debug UART output from the box to understand what the issue is - else it's a blind guessing exercise and I'd rather not start that.

    @chewitt thank you for the reply. the flashing stops at 3%

    I tried to connect the box to a desktop comuter with a serial rs232 cable,<Rx Tx Gnd>

    the cable is connected to some 3 solder points on the board <they re not labeled but I believe those are the ones>,but unfortunately I get nothing on putty screen when I power on the device,I tried all wiring combinations,sometimes I get some weird characters when I try a specififc wiring combination.

    this is the burning tool log

    Edited 2 times, last by scarface911 (May 8, 2020 at 1:21 PM).

    • Official Post

    You'll need a TTL adapter (normally a USB device) as the signal voltage levels are different to a standard RS232 port. I also see nothing on the board to indicate those are the UART pins, although it's a low resolution image and markings could be on the underside. Normally the +ve pin (pin 1) will have a solid white triangle pointing to it (see the white connector on the left side of the image for an example) or has a white square ring around it - something distinctive. In future please post output to a pastebin site and images to somewhere like imgur - you can share higher resolution images that way.

    To fix this you'll need to create an SD card image with u-boot from an A95X-F3 box and then short pins on one of the emmc chips so that the box is forced to search for BL2 firmware on the SD card. If you can get into u-boot (or higher level OS) it's normally possible to zero the emmc (or at least enough of it to resolve the broken boot firmware) and then the box will always boot from SD card and OS installs become easier.

    @chewitt thanks again for the reply

    unfortunately I dont have this TTL adapter at the moment,and sorry my knowledge about this is very limited.

    I dont know how to get the uboot file from my image,when I unpack the image using level 1 I get the following files :<picture>.

    I tried just using sd burn card maker but it didnt work,another problem I dont know which pins to short,the emmc pins are invisible<underneath>.

    Ive been looking for weeks now,theres not much info out there about this box

    xfocus29 hello, thank you for the reply

    Unfortunately I don't have a uart adapter to try this, but this looks promising since I've never seen nor tried your method before,

    And btw how do I get the boot.img and kernel.img for my box?

    @chewitt hello again I hope you re doing well.

    I did manage to get a uart adapter and successfully connected it to the box

    here is the log I get when I power on the device

    External Content pastebin.com
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    thank you

    • Official Post

    scarface911 this endless loop is BL1 (hard-coded into the SoC) searching for BL2 firmware. It is actually a better (more simple to work from) position than having the wrong or broken firmware installed, as we can experiment with booting from an SD card.

    Write the images below to an SD card and pastebin the UART output so we can see what happens, both C4/VIM3L are SM1 devices:

    LibreELEC-AMLG12.arm-9.80.0-khadas-vim3l.img.gz

    LibreELEC-AMLG12.arm-9.80.0-odroid-c4.img.gz

    If any of them boot (u-boot) but fail to run the kernel, download the AMLG12 "box" image from the same location and steal the SEI610 device-tree from it (change the dtb name in extlinux.conf) as I've had one person report that it works (mostly) with an A95X-F3 device.

    this is the log for the first image

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    this one for the second

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    If any of them boot (u-boot) but fail to run the kernel, download the AMLG12 "box" image from the same location and steal the SEI610 device-tree from it (change the dtb name in extlinux.conf) as I've had one person report that it works (mostly) with an A95X-F3 device

    sorry but I dont understand this part,how do I get the SEI610 file?

    • Official Post

    Those logs show no sign of u-boot at all, so I think the SD card image is not written correctly. Even if the boot firmware has the wrong SM1 fip sources or bad RAM timings you'll still see BL2 loading and some form of output on the console.

    The C4/VIM3L images have a single dtb in them for the respective device. The "box" image has all the dtb's including the SEI610 dtb. You can copy the SEI610 dtb from that image to an SD card created from the C4 or VIM3L images and then edit extlinux.conf to change the dtb name.

    I still get the same log,im using libreeelec creator,I tried 2 diifferent cards.

    I couldnt find the SEI610 dtb I downloaded one from here / - device/amlogic/yukawa-kernel - Git at Google

    the box stock image has a dtb file named meson1.dtb and the c4/vim3 have meson-sm1-odroid-c4.dtb and meson-sm1-khadas-vim3l.dtb.

    i guess im doing something wrong, I dont know nothing about linux

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    • Official Post

    If you're using the .img.gz files that I linked, it's the first and only Amlogic device I've encountered which is not looking for boot firmware in the normal and known locations, and there isn't much I can do to help. The last dice-roll is writing them to a USB stick instead of an SD card.