Reinstalling Jetson from Scratch

Hello,

after i played around with kernel settings, i have several issues with my jetson xavier agx (see attached picture, this occurs during the start; now everything is quite unstable).

I want to reinstall everything from scratch, delete everything there is on the jetson and reset everything. I tried it with a host-PC and SDK manager. Everything is running fine. First I uninstall the OS and everything via the SDK manager, then i reinstall everything. After that it sais it was succsessfull.
The ridiculous thing is that nothing has changed when I reboot the jetson after that. No Data has been deleted at all, same issues occur.

Is there a different way to reinstall / reset the Jetson to factory settings?

thanks

Sounds like you didn’t reflash your board at all.
What you should do is share the steps you have done in sdkmanager. Also, please tell us if this is your first time re-flashing the board, so that we can know how familiar you might be with jetson.

There is one point here that seems giving out a clue.

You said

Everything is running fine. First I uninstall the OS and everything via the SDK manager, then i reinstall everything. After that it sais it was succsessfull.

Actually, sdkmanager does not have this “uninstall OS” steps. SDKM does not care what was pre-installed on the module. It just format all emmc and do the flash. If you do see sdkmanager say it is “uninstalling” something, probably you are just deleting the files on your host side but not the jetson.

For more detail, probably anything “uninstall” refers to applications, not operating system. When you flash and install this wipes out everything anyway, so never any need to do that. Just tell it to flash the operating system to the Jetson, and to not do anything else (there are several options you can uncheck, but the GUI doesn’t always make it obvious you can uncheck them). Then make sure you start with the Jetson in recovery mode during flash. You can always run JetPack/SDKM again later with the Jetson not in recovery mode and with SDKM told you only want to install software, not flash, and add any extras (e.g., CUDA).

thanks so far.
i added a few screenshots of my doing. sorry for the quality, i need to use a VM, the resolution is quite bad.

first i klick the uninstall button as shown in the picture

then i can see all the things installed on the jetson. i klick uninstall (not shown in the picture)

after this i want to install the things again, following the GUI. I can see that everything is detected properly

and last, i cann see all the things downloading. the Jetson OS is here already downloaded and ready to be flashed.

so is there the possibility to boot from a bootable USB stick, reinstall ubuntu and then the Jetpack sdk? how can i change the boot prio to USB?

I suppose there is a possible way to boot to USB stick, but my gut feeling is that it won’t be possible (I can’t guarantee it).

A VM will quite often fail due to losing USB during the flash as the Jetson disconnects and reconnects on the USB (a VM often does not handle such an event correctly).

Also, I note in what is checked in the SDKM GUI that you are also adding to the host PC and adding optional packages. Uncheck all of that and see if flashing the Jetson OS image is possible. That is the simplest test case. If it works, then you can uncheck flash and run again with just components (the Jetson must be in recovery mode to flash, and the Jetson must not be in recovery mode to add extras).

If you want to have a fully bootable usb drive to let jetson AGX boot from it, and you don’t need to use sdkmanager anymore, then it may not be possible. Below posts have more detail about the mechanism here.

One more note: A USB thumb drive uses different drivers than does USB SATA drive. USB SATA is likely to work even when USB thumb is “less likely to work” (so far as I know).

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