Spark Setup Troubleshooting

Hello all!

I just bought 2 sparks and opened one up to get setup going; it’s been stuck on “Almost Done! Please wait while your DGX Spark is rebooted to complete setup.” for 2 hours now.

HDMI to display and USB-C keyboard used to navigate setup thus far; was able to connect to wifi 5g no problem, download updates took maybe 20 minutes, but the progress bar was notably progressing every few minutes.

And then this; all I can find is it “might take as much as 10 minutes” but to absolutely not disrupt it during this step. Of course, I can leave it be and don’t want to exacerbate the situation, but 2 hours seems excessive for getting zero progress feedback. It hasn’t rebooted and resumed an install or anything of that nature, just the clockwise-green-triangle graphic on loop.

Called in to customer support, which basically was worse than Googling (and in fact he referred me to Google…), which I had already done (and thus why I called in!). Downloaded Nvidia Sync on my macbook, but it says my 1234.local address is invalid.

Please help, I had anxiety dropping bank on 2 of these, followed by massive excitement to unbox and get building, followed by massive disappointment that I have a shiny paperweight (I have faith it’ll be fine in the end, but I’ve been in the game for decades and never encountered something so premium having such a poor experience).

Yeah, there’s a lot of weird bugs with these boxes.
One really important one is that after updates, you have to unplug and let it sit for a bit. Make sure you unplug the power supply as well, and then reconnect and let it restart because I had the power being capped to GPU at 11W.
Also, one of my boxes had two terabytes of disk test data taking up a lot of space, which had to be removed. Another box had a partition that was only 627 gigs or so that had to be grown, so there’s a lot of little annoying inconsistencies there.
As soon as I get on the login screen, I have a Claude connect to it via ssh and examine it.
Especially if you have two, you probably want to install Ansible and have Claude manage it with Ansible. So things stay consistent.

I would recommend reflashing the ROM (finding the ROM can be a bit complicated though, so heads up for that).

Then during initial setup, plug in the Ethernet when it tells you to connect to the web, then when it starts updating, immediately disconnect the Ethernet.

It will just boot normally.