Have Two CM5 uConsoles, neither will boot

uConsole
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1

Hello,

My partner and I both received our uConsoles recently, after putting them both together and installing our CM5s (lite versions, 8GB RAM, with WI-FI, no onboard storage), we wrote Rex’s Bookworm image, but neither device is properly booting.

Device seems to power on, but screen stays off and force shutdown does not work.

I’ll go through everything we’ve tried.

First:

Screen, batteries, and board on both devices all seem to be working properly. Light turns green when the power button is held down. Both consoles successfully booted once to the Bookworm Lite login screen, however before we could enter anything, the login disappeared leaving a blank terminal, and then the screen powered off (green light was still on - but could no longer be force shutdown by holding the button down - and when rebooted there was no power to the display again).

I should also mention, when powered on, no power seems to be coming from the USB drive. Tried plugging in an RGB mouse to see if it lit up and nada.

Testing was done both plugged in and unplugged to wall power.

IMG_0947
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All isos were written using the Raspberry Pi Imager obtained from the official Arch repository.

We attempted a few images from Rex
Bookworm
Bookworm Lite
Retropie

Not Rex’s, but we tried a NixOS build which booted, but only showed a terminal covered in #'s, one line of which being green. Left it on this screen for half an hour or so, when I rebooted went back to having no display.

Have also attempted this fix a couple times. Did not work.

Have tried a few different SD cards as well.

Sandisk Extreme Plus 64GB
Sandisk Extreme 64GB
Sandisk Ultra 32GB
Sandisk Ultra 16GB
Old 4GB Sandisk
Samsung T9 128GB
Generic 16GB Card

Anyone have any clue what may be up? My guess is that the EEPROM needs to be updated, but I’m waiting on a micro-HDMI cable to use an external display. But anyone have any ideas I can try in the meantime?

Thank you!

2

The eeprom is probably up to date now, but the SD card config settings in the eeprom make sd cards more reliable.

The lack of forced shutdown is unfortunately a cm5 problem, there’s a few differences between the cm4 and cm5 and as a result forced shutdown no longer works for the cm5

3

Here’s from a posting I made a few weeks ago describing what fixed this problem for me-


MikeJSTB:Today is the anniversary of the day you joined our community!:

14d

Holy moley , it’s working!

And it was so simple, following the advice here https://youtu.be/CpXH9CWM_Kw?si=22RHynw93JpOXS0O

Basically use the Raspberrt Pi Imager.

  1. Use the “no filter” option
  2. Choose the RP5 boot loader from the options menu
  3. Burn your SD card
  4. Insert SD into uConsole & power up with batteries & USB C power supply
  5. Wait approximately 8 minutes
  6. Back to Imager, burn your chosen Rex OS Image
  7. Turn off uC remove usb c & batteries
  8. Insert your SD card from step 6
  9. Power uC up, wait a few…and it boots!!!

I’ve been fighting with this for months! Woo-Hoo!

I believe it was the “running the boot loader” step in steps 2&3 that made it work

4

I appreciate this, but I have already tried this set of instructions a couple times and haven’t gotten it to work :pensive_face:

5

If you have a micro HDMI I would plug that in to see what its actually doing.

This helped me figuring out what stage its not proceeding from when I had SDcard boot issues.
Which for me was a problem with the EEPROM config as snipeytje mentions. Look at Rexes included guide on the image page; Trixie 6.12.y for the uConsole and DevTerm

_________________________________

Quote of the info

If you have a CM5 lite and are having problems with the sd card booting. You need to edit your EEPROM and your CM5 lite has to have updated firmware that was released after 2025-01-06. Check using vcgencmd version to update sudo rpi-eeprom-update
sudo rpi-eeprom-config -e To edit the eeprom.
backup current config, then replace with:

[all]
BOOT_UART=1

# Switch off PMIC outputs on HALT
POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1

# Default BOOT_ORDER for provisioning
# SD -> NVMe -> USB -> Network
BOOT_ORDER=0xf461

# Try boot on SDCard repeatly
SD_BOOT_MAX_RETRIES=2

# Slow down SDCard SDR Mode on bootloader
SD_QUIRKS=1
7

Yeah, I assume this is the issue. Micro-HDMI won’t be here until Tuesday though…