We purchased six Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kits. We downloaded the Linux SD card image directly from NVIDIA and inserted the SD cards into the Nanos. Four of the six units booted successfully, but two will not boot Linux. We tried reformatting the SD cards, using different image versions, and testing brand-new SD cards, without success.
I am concerned that some of the Nanos may have hardware damage, but I am unsure how to verify this or whether a fix can be implemented. Are there diagnostic steps we can take to resolve this?
Hi,
It could be just the bootloader on the device has some issue.
Trying to flash sdkmanager from another x86 host PC to Jetson would help.
Are you able to load the UFEI? I’m having a similar issue, I have a brand new one and it won’t boot at all not even to the UFEI. The fan just pulses and and when I try to flash it with the SDK manager it says the board isn’t ready. (It is in recovery mode)
You need to make sure your host PC is not a VM because generally it would affect the detection of USB device.
Beware that Jetsons don’t have a true hardware BIOS. All of that is in software. For a dev kit model which has the SD card on the module itself, and is not an eMMC model with a third party carrier board, the content equivalent to a BIOS goes into the QSPI memory. Some details change between whether it is an L4T R35.x release or R36.x release, but the major release version in QSPI has to match that of the SD card. Otherwise, the Jetson won’t boot. One has to flash the actual Jetson at least once to the correct major release version to update the QSPI since it is not part of the SD card. Have you tried flashing the Jetson itself and not just the SD card? Releases of software for flash and documents for specific L4T releases can be found here:
https://developer.nvidia.com/linux-tegra