Bad flash on T95M, usb burning tool doesn't see box, what can I do?

nosmokingbandit · January 6, 2024 at 8:15 PM

So I may have bricked this box to the point of no return.

Its a T95M that I've had for some time and whenever I've done dumb things I could restore the original firmware via the amlogic burn tool, which would restore the original uboot and put everything back in order.

My box won't boot. I get a black screen (not a no signal screen, but a black screen) and nothing else. I can't get it to boot from usb or sd using the button in the AV plug hole.

I try to get the amlogic burn tool to see the box and nothing happens. Windows doesn't even make the sound it does when a device is plugged in. I try shorting the pins on the eeprom like I've done in the past, but the box remains invisible to my pc.

I don't have a uart, though I'd be willing to learn how to use one if it would give any insight to why or how this is trying to boot. But I'm hoping there is a simpler trick I'm not aware of.

Any chance I can bring this back to life?

bumerc · January 8, 2024 at 8:36 AM

You can't get around it without uart..

**chewitt** · January 8, 2024 at 8:48 AM

True "bricking" of the box requires physical hardware damage, but flashing an incompatible u-boot will leave the box in a software state which is challenging for most users to self-recover from. Amlogic silicon normally prioritises emmc boot; so flashing something that won't boot to emmc results in an endless boot-failure loop. UART cables aren't the solution; although they will allow you to see what's happening and confirm the endless loop. If we assume you don't have a special HDMI boot dongle or SDIO debug board the only way to stop emmc boot is shorting pins on the emmc chip to electrically disable it; thus allowing boot to progress to the next step which is checking for boot firmware on SD or USB media. Most Android recovery images won't fully boot from SD/USB media, but as long as you can get u-boot itself to run the device should then show up in Amlogic flashing tools again. You'll find more info on shorting emmc pins in other forums: flashing Android images to Android boxes isn't really a LibreELEC problem to solve.

nosmokingbandit · January 9, 2024 at 12:06 AM

I was under the impression, perhaps mistakenly so, that in order to flash libreelec to the emmc I would need to restore the original uboot (that seems to be corrupted), then load libreelec from the usb/sd and continue from there. I don't care at all about the original android fw, I just thought that was step 1 in getting this box back in a usable state.

If I understand you correctly I may be able to boot directly from the usb if the emmc is shorted?

**chewitt** · January 9, 2024 at 12:59 AM

You need to restore vendor u-boot to the box so we can hook it and run from SD/USB media. We do not support running LE from eMMC storage unless the board/box has upstream u-boot support - then we can overwrite eMMC with a full image that includes upstream u-boot. Your T95M does not have upstream u-boot support.