The Nvidia Jetson Tx2 development kit turned on black screen after update

We have installed ubuntu version 16.04 on Nvidia Jetson tx2. The update message appeared on the screen. we answered yes. we have a problem turning on the pc again. We can’t use keyboard, mouse and cmd. we see a black screen. there are numbers on the screen. Then this screen freezes. How can we access ubuntu again?

Ubuntu 16.04 is quite old even for a Jetson. The method for upgrading this to 18.04 requires using the flash software since the older releases have no understanding of boot content for a Jetson. Some of the more recent JetPack/SDK Manager flash software understands upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04, but the TX2 itself does not support that. Basically you will need to flash again using a more recent R32.x release. You could clone the existing content for reference if you don’t want to lose this, but there isn’t really a way to back out the upgrade changes Ubuntu made which won’t work on a Jetson. The list of releases is here (most recent at the moment is R32.7.2):
https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-linux-archive

Thank you, Can jetson tx2 be reset to factory settings?

There is no “factory settings” per se. All you can do is flash. Recovery mode itself just puts the Jetson in a mode which turns it into a custom USB device (without altering memory) understood by the “driver package” (and the driver package is part of the host PC flash software…JetPack/SDK Manager is a GUI front end to actual flash software, with the driver package being the logic behind the flash).

Most people are accustomed to a PC when it comes to installing an operating system. A PC has a BIOS, and mostly one would normally think of flashing the BIOS as separate from installing the operating system. On a Jetson, and most embedded systems, software takes the place of a BIOS, and flash is both flash of the operating system and the equivalent of BIOS at the same time. This means it is extremely hard to truly “brick” a Jetson in comparison to a PC (and modern motherboards often have a dual BIOS due to this reason), and it also means a Jetson cannot self-flash (which is somewhat the meaning of a “factory reset”).

If you expect to develop for a Jetson, then by far the easiest thing to do is to have an Ubuntu 18.04 host PC to work with, which allows flash or a number of support roles. You could set that up with dual boot. VMs are not supported, but if the underlying filesystem type is ext4, and if you have correctly set up VM passthrough of USB with a lot of disk space, then this has been known to also work.

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.