Pandora Down: start-up reset loop syndrome?


akeley

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Joined
Nov 5, 2013
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37
Folks,

I bought this unit off ebay a few months ago. It is a classic one running at  600 Mhz. It was running fine until a few weeks ago it refused to boot and then went into that loop thingy where it starts up, displays the logo, then restarts. Symptoms like in this thread: http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/8426-battery-completely-dead/

I tried all the things described in this thread - charging for days between my two batteries, plugging charger without battery - no luck, it`s stuck in that loop. Occasionally I could enter the boot menu and choose other kernels but it always dies/restest afterwards anyway.

I`m totally gutted to be honest, since I always wanted one, could never afford it, and only splurged on this purchase as a 40th b-day treat...damn...just when I totally  fell in love with DosBox EX :/

Any input would be greatly appreciated, perhaps somebody has any idea as to what could be causing this (the aforementioned thread is kinda unresolved) and/or if there`s any chance of repairing this unit. 

Thanks
 
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Yes, if it gets as far as displaying the logo that means it's started booting the OS, I think. It's then crashing and rebooting, since it's crashed so early in init there's nothing better to be done than reboot and try again. It's probably pumping out error messages somewhere, but you'd need the right equipment to read them, and as an end user there's probably little you could do in the short term to fix it using those errors.


So I second a reflash. The OS is hosed, you need a new one.
 
Ah, used the first reference I found!

FWIW there's a potentially misleading heading on the more up to date installation guide there, under 'Full Fresh Installation', 'TO SD Card' should really read 'From SD Card'.

Then, under 'Partial distribution upgrade' the headings seem to be in a wrong order, the first paragraph should have the heading 'To Nand' whereas the paragraph which does have the 'To Nand' heading is actually a brief description of manual bootable SD card creation.
 
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^ noticed that myself.. maybe one of the wiki editors can change this. And straighten out the User Manual.
 
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GREAT SUCCESS!

It`s also rather embarrassing - as an ex PC serviceman I should have an in-built "reinstall the system 1st!" auto-response to any kind of trouble, but I sort of got fixated on the idea that it`s strictly a hardware problem, as if the poor thing wasnt` getting enough juice for some reason...been reading into that other thread too much I guess. 

Whew...I really though this one`s a lost cause...so THANKS A MILLION guys :)
 
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