TX2 board not booting, TTY console not working, flashing throws error. Is it forever dead?

Hello all,

I have a serious issue with TX2 board and need an expert advise. While trying to pipeline execute purge for manually installed packages on TX2, I ended up accidentally removing a LOT of other packages which led to Ubuntu OS crash. Now when the board is powering up, it brings tty screen and prompts to enter user login: _

Upon typing anything it thinks for few seconds and just refreshes that page. So it’s forever stuck on that tty page and does not respond to any entry, switching between tty pages etc.

I tried to flash the board. TX2 goes into recovery mode, my host device detects it via USB, I proceed with JetPack installation and every time it crashes during the following step:

18:04:13 ERROR : Flash Jetson TX2 : Run commands failed at step Install: command sudo ./flash.sh jetson-tx2 mmcblk0p1 finished with error

At this point, it’s my understanding that I properly messed up, till the point that even TX2’s sudo commands were purged and it cannot even be flashed. That being said, is there absolutely anything I can try? I obviously shouldn’t have done the purge and perform flashing instead. Not something I’ll ever play with again. Thanks.

I suggest manually running that line and logging it. Then post the log. Alternatively, delete the content in the “~/.nvsdkm/” directory and the “~/nvidia/” directory, and then run SDK Manager again (fresh content).

To log, basically you’d cd to the correct “Linux_for_Tegra/” directory (for TX2 “~/nvidia/nvidia_sdk/JetPack_{WhateverVersionItIs}_Linux_P3310/Linux_for_Tegra/”), and then flash with logging (with the TX2 in recovery mode):

# Log everything:
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-tx2 mmcblk0p1 2>&1 | tee log.txt
# Or to cut down progress bar size in logs:
sudo ./flash.sh -S 14580MiB jetson-tx2 mmcblk0p1 2>&1 | gawk '{gsub("[0-9][0-9]+[/][0-9[0-9]+ bytes sent..",".");print}' | tee log.txt

The second method will just cut part of the progress bar repeated spam (in a terminal the progress bar back spaces, and then overwrites a character, but log files can’t back space…thus large logs).

If you hover your mouse over the quote icon in the upper right of one of your existing posts, then you will see other icons show up. The paper clip icon will let you attach the log file.

I doubt there is any kind of hardware failure, but there are a lot of things which can go wrong with flash. For example, the partition the flash is from has to be rather large. You could run “df -H -T ~/nvidia/JetPack_{WhichEverVersionItIs}_Linux_P3310” and verify your disk space first (you probably need 35GB of space and type ext4).