Friday my new Smartbook (I have it for less than 3 weeks) was working very well. I powered it off Friday night, and when I next went to use it on Monday, it started to misbehave: freezing on boot (with the green led stuck on), not resuming from suspend properly, and once it hung after login (before showing the desktop).

Now it will not turn on anymore. Whenever I try to power it on, the power button light starts blinking in white at around 0.5Hz (1s on, 1s off) and nothing else happens (I have to hold the power button for a while to stop the blinking). The bootloader led (caps lock led) does not blink at all. This also happened Monday, but after a few tries it booted. Now it does not boot anymore no matter how many times I try.

If I plug the charger the power button lights orange as usual, but even with the charger plugged in I cannot boot it (same white power button light blinking). I also tried taking off the battery for several seconds, which also made no difference.

Is there anything I can do to make it work again?

This unfortunately sounds like you will need to RMA the device. The white blinking LED like that means that it can not find a device to boot from. I'd suggest mailing whichever store you bought the Smartbook from, and see what your options are. Unfortunately we do not have a way to restore these machines at the current time.

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Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

Is it the processor that cannot find the flash memory where u-boot is, or is it u-boot that cannot find the boot.scr file? If it is the second option, would it be possible to boot from a SD card with a boot.scr to recover, or at least find out what is happening?

It's a little more complicated than that, but the basic answer is no. The system isn't even getting to a point where it can find u-boot. Booting from an SD card won't work because the system doesn't know about any devices to know that it can.

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Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

For the first time, I start the smartbook to update some non essential packages. After 1 hour, I turned off the computer but system freeze before a complete shutdown, now after many tries, only the power button blink nothing else.

I would like to know where I can buy the debug board for the smartbook , to understand this issue ? In the store the debug board
seems to be aimed for smarttop, why can i not use it for smartbook ?

Has anyone an advice to prevent this issue ?

To verify the malfunction of the internal drive you can boot from an external installer SD-card. But when asked for confirmation to install you say "N" and you are dropped into a terminal. The username and password are "oem"/"oem".

From there you can fsck and badblock -check the internal sda-partitions.

Our project experienced 4 internal flash drive failures, verified by a large badblocks.txt list.

Hi. We will replace any system that is non-functional. Please send it back to us for replacement as we did for Matthias.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Thanks for your response.

Yes i have tried to boot from sd card but system can't boot from
it, I follow your advice for a replacement.

Regards