A95xF1 install

    Hi,

    I dug out an old S905W-based A95XF1 from a drawer for my daughter's student flat. It should do the job. I tried LibreELEC-AMLGX. aarch64-12.2.0-box.img.gz and LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-11.0.6-box.img.gz, but after forcing the boot on SD with a toothpick, I get the BOX logo and then, depending on the DTB I choose, I either get a black screen or the HDMI signal disappears. Does anyone have any ideas? I think it has something to do with the DTB. I think when I used it, my DTB was 281_2g or something like that.

    Thank you.

    If the box has previously been used with CE images, recovery boot (toothpick etc.) MUST be re-invoked else vendor u-boot looks for the wrong filenames and LE images simply won't boot. So one possibility is that you haven't quite gotten the hold/release timing to invoke that correct yet. Some manufacturers tweak the timings so it can be a fiddly and failure-prone process.

    The p281 or Tanix TX3 mini device-trees should boot the box as they're basically the same. The TX3 device-tree also describes the VFD display on the front so p281 would be recommended, but even if yours doesn't have a VFD display (or perhaps a differently wired one) that difference is harmless to boot. Other 'S905X' device-trees will likely boot the box too, but S905W would be preferred as the W chip runs slower so 'overclocking' can cause lock-ups.

    You can also see if appending video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60D to boot params in uEnv.ini makes a difference? - This forces the initial HDMI state to 1080p in-case the box is trying to negotiate some other unsupported (sometimes 4K) mode with the TV.

    The "box" image here: https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/ has been boot tested on a TX3 mini in the last couple of days (due to upstreaming work on support for VFD displays) so I know the image is good. The codebase of the image is newer the LE11/12 images that you tried, but from a boot-files perspective nothing changed.

    The only thing that's really useful in this scenario is the UART boot logs that show what the box actually did, but most users don't have a UART cable, and most cheaper Android STBs don't have the UART pins wired on the board, so normally we can only guess at problems /shrug