I got my replacement Efika around a week back and it was working perfectly till yesterday when it started failing to boot every alternate time !

Here are the details of the behaviour:-

I switch it on and it loads uboot (caps lock flashes 3-4 times) and screen gets backlit but there is no bootsplash logo etc and also the hard disk light (green light on left handside with email type of icon) doesn't flash extensively like it usually does. It just flash once or twice. System remains with this black screen till I hold down the power button for 3-4 seconds. On reboot it boots perfectly to the desktop and internal flash hard disk doesn't show any errors with hdparm and shows good 20MBPS speed etc.

If i boot from an SDCard it boots every time.

I tried re-installing the image from SDCard twice. Then i manually re-installed the image by creating partitions and checking for bad blocks while formatting etc. But it still does the alternate boot thing. Though sometimes it will boot 2-3 times in a row but usually not.

Right now this is not a show stopped for me as I am doing a demo to a client so i just boot it first before entering. I am only worried whether it may stop booting altogether after some days as that would be a big problem since client is already finicky about reliability of the system.I tried using live system on SDCard but its pretty slow as i can't get any SDCard above 10MBPS here.


Its already a replacement so i definitely don't want to ask for another replacement.

I do still have the earlier efika mx sb unit which never booted (did not load uboot - even from SDCard). I have to send it back but in case there's a chance of replacing some component (like say the WiFi card or 3G card - i had heard they also create boot problems in rare cases) from that unit to this new unit I may be able to ask the efika sales guys and if they're OK i can do that.

And, i haven't installed anything strange on it. Just some apps from preconfigured ubuntu & efika repos along with libnfc and a small script. Rest of of our application runs in the browser so that we can keep the micro kiosks more 'appliance like'

I don't have any strange hardware except a usb nfc reader and a 3G sim card. I have tried removing both but the behaviour is still there.

I do run the smartbook for 4-5 hours continuously every day during demo but it never gets warm so i am assuming that's not a problem. Besides the error is there even on first boot of the day.

I couldn't find any errors on the system logs - but i am reading the logs after successful boot. Maybe i'll should try getting the logs by booting SDCard after a failed boot ? Which logs should i try ? And is this issue there with any other customers ? What is the probable cause ?