Vivid Unit + GPSDR failed to boot after enabling GPU

Although we had never encountered this problem before, it seems your Linux kernel update failed and the boot did not continue.

There are ways to only fix the kernel, but the simplest method is to reset the whole device, if you don't have important data on the device yet.

You may follow this tutorial to reset your device: https://www.vividunit.com/install-os

When you enable GPU again, you can use this command to also save the command output to "engpu.log" file. 

curl -sL https://bit.ly/ENGPU | bash 2>&1 | tee engpu.log

Make sure to copy this file (or send it via email) before rebooting. If the problem persists, we can check the engpu.log file and figure out what happened.

@admin Excellent, thank you.  I'll reset the device and try again

@admin

There is no data of mine on the device.  It arrived here yesterday, so reinstalling as new seems like the right thing to do.

There were many failures attempting to perform the initial setup.  I'll attach photos here.  It seems there were missing packages, invalid certificates, and other issues.

Following your tutorial to reinstall the OS on this device, the following happens:

Plug in USB C cable

Link light lights yellow on ethernet port

Press and hold SW5 on Vivid board

Press and hold power button

Green activity light lights on ethernet port

Windows "new hardware"

Windows "hardware removed"

Green light goes out

"Maskrom", ID 11 appears on Port 3 within FactoryTool in between windows hardware noises

Now I'm thinking this may be a defective unit.  What's next?

Thanks for your help.

@admin Here's the second of three images captured when performing the initial setup of the Vivid Unit and GPSDR:

@admin Here's the third of three images

Posted by: @pete-norloff

↑

"Maskrom", ID 11 appears on Port 3 within FactoryTool in between windows hardware noises

This seems correct and it means your Vivid Unit has entered MaskROM mode, which is needed for flashing the OS.

I can not see your images maybe you can upload it to third-party image hosting server?

@admin Thanks - the problem is that "Maskrom", ID 11 appears for about a second in between the "new hardware found" sound and the "hardware disconnected" sound in Windows.  The device is not staying connected.

I'll try sending slightly more compressed versions of the screen shots so you can see some of the errors that occurred during initial setup.

@admin Screen shot 2:

@admin Screen shot 3

Please note that these screen shots were from the initial failed setup.  The device is completely unresponsive now

@pete-norloff In your screenshots, the only important error message is this one (other messages are complaining the system is too old):

Err:6 https://uugear.com/apt-repo stable InRelease
Certificate verification failed: The certificate is NoT trusted, The certificate chain uses not yet valid certificate.
Could not handshake: Error in the certificate verification.

It says it doesn't trust the certificate used by uugear.com (our software repository is hosted there). This issue is also mentioned in the review on rtl-sdr.com, and the solution is to run:

sudo update-ca-certificates

Strangely we have never reproduced this issue here in the Netherlands, but I guess the solution also works for you.

Howerver, I don't think this issue will brick your device. In case of the certificate does not get truested, it just can't download and install our software hosted on uugear.com, there is no way it can still write something to the kernel partition and brick the device.

@pete-norloff About entering MASKROM mode, I think that wiki page was wrong on one thing: you just need to hold the MAKSROM button and power button for about 5 seconds, and then you release them so the device can show up.

Keep holding the buttons may not let the device to show up normally, sometimes the scenario you described could happen. I have updated that wiki page accordingly.

@admin This is good news, thanks.  I will try re-loading the OS in MASKROM mode again.  Thank you very much for your guidance.