Hello! Yesterday I received my uconsole, and later in the evening, I was unable to start my Uconsole CM5 (8GB no eMMC). This happened after I either turned off the system by holding the power button or removed the batteries because the attempt with the power button was unsuccessful. I don’t exactly remember what I did. The thing is, my Kali Linux from @rex froze for some reason, and I couldn’t do anything, so I resorted to one of the actions mentioned above.
After that, I couldn’t boot into Kali. The screen had backlighting, and I charged the uconsole for several hours when my system froze at about 75% charge. I thought the problem was with the OS, so I re-flashed the Sandisk Extreme 256GB USB drive with Parrot Security, but nothing happened except for the backlighting of the screen and the orange indicator lighting up. After several attempts, the screen stopped lighting up altogether, but the green indicator on top was still on (not as when I hold the power button for 10 seconds). This morning, I tried to install Bookworm from @rex, but the result was the same.
I tried connecting my uconsole to an external monitor, but there was still no image. The cable is definitely working; I checked it on my RPI4. I also reassembled my uconsole and at this stage checked its operation without additional modules like 4G or the screen with a keyboard. I also tried two different SD cards of varying sizes, but the result was the same.
I attempted to power it on without batteries using a cable and tried two different chargers: one from my laptop (60 watts) and another from my smartphone (35 watts).
I can’t understand if the problem lies with the uconsole board or my CM5, and whether I should contact the store where I bought the CM5 or ClockworkPi.
When you did have it booted did you apply the eeprom fix as written out in my bookworm or Trixie threads? That’s something you need to do ASAP to have a reliable CM5 in the uConsole.
No, I’m sorry. When I received my uconsole, I didn’t think I would encounter such problems, so I didn’t study this topic. In any case, I couldn’t boot into the system to resolve this, but I found a solution and will publish it now.
Could you also explain how to mark a post as “Solved”?
Hello!!! I found a solution and was able to fully restore my uconsole. Unfortunately, my post just passed moderation, but overall, I’ve been using my uconsole for a while now.
Alright, let’s get to the solution: I decided to try flashing the bootloader for the RPi5 CM5 using the Raspberry Pi Imager, and it worked! I got a picture, or rather green artifacts on the screen. I left the uconsole for a few minutes to make sure the bootloader was updated, after which I was able to see the bootloader during startup (without a memory card with the bootloader update or anything else)! After that, all I had to do was install any of the operating systems available on the forum onto the memory card.
Postscript: I found the solution five minutes after publishing the post for moderation, but I still decided to publish it to help others, even though I couldn’t cancel the publication.
!!! Important !!! I think you should use Bookworm from @rex right at the first startup to update the EEPROM, and then this problem shouldn’t occur again.
I need help, I haven’t been able to turn on my uConsole. I received it today, installed the CM5 8GB Lite, and tried several SD cards with Trixie and Bookworm, but nothing works. The screen stays black, the green button light comes on, but that’s it.I already tried the SD card and Raspberry Pi image bootloader thing, and I put the SD card in the uConsole with the bootloader but nothing happens, and then I put the SD card in with the OS and still nothing. And I’ve tried more than 10 SD cards
this post has the information about eeprom updates needed to get the cm5 to boot reliably with all SD cards, smaller SD cards often work out of the box
To add on to this response, coming from a CM4…. and not having any additional boards to boot the CM5 to edit the eeprom…. this is me recalling what i did…
Pre-requisite. My unit is using a CM5 lite with 16GB RAM. The SDcard is flashed with @Rex image using Ubuntu. i’m using a High endurance card from SanDisk. 256GB.
When i first got my CM5 and installed it, booting it resulted in a black screen. You can watch the screen closely. you might sometimes see a slight flicker, but it blanks out. This indicates that the device might have booted, but just unable to display.
i powered on and off a few times, holding the power button or even having to remove the batteries just to ensure that the power was off before rebooting. But i finally got the CM5 to boot. i suspect that you might be able to plug in an additional display to troubleshoot, but i luckily i didn’t have to.
2a) i have a USB to ethernet dongle on mine and my device is connected to the network via LAN. As the image has SSH enabled, if the device comes up, i could find the IP and ping it… and get to the device regardless of display. i could then perform the next step via SSH.
Once i had a display, i immediately performed the EEPROM update and fix as suggested in the link provided by @snipeytje .
Once done, everything boots normally.
Wish it was easier, but I hope this helps.
Another option is to just purchase another boot board (waveshare?) and fix the EEPROM via that.