I havent used my mini in a bit, just plugged it in and attempted to run but it wont boot into bio and has the white led lit along with the blue led, what does the blinking blue led mean again?
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A fast-blinking blue LED means it was unable to boot or resume from suspend. That LED is also the disk activity LED, so if you have a SATA disk, don’t confuse that with blinking due to disk activity during boot.
There can be many reasons for that, such as non-working memory or bugs in earlier firmware releases.
The first thing to try is to unplug power and plug it back in, then try to boot - it sounds like you’ve already done that, but if not give it a try. Unplug anything you don’t need to boot, like extra USB devices or extra hard disks.
Make sure there is memory installed, try switching the DIMMs. For a single DIMM, just move it to the other slot. You could try different DDR4 memory from another system if you have some.
Once it does boot, update to the latest firmware: https://source.puri.sm/firmware/utility/#usage
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thanks for reply,
the computer was working fine last time I used it. everything up to date including the firmware. computer has sat for 3 months no more / less unused. ram and nvme all worked and has installed OS. I have done as you mentioned, everything unplugged already, only power supply.
scratching my head like wha?
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Thanks for the update @UnknClone .
Did you try swapping the DIMMs? That forces it to refresh the SPD cache and perform memory training again. It will take about a minute to re-train memory, the display will not come on until that completes. (The fast-blinking blue light won’t be on though, if that comes on it has given up trying to boot.)
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And even before swapping DIMMs, it can help just to reseat the DIMMs.
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I took out the ram but no change.
I don’t get it. I was using all last semester and never had an issue with it, excluding the firmware that needed to be updated long ago. (was a display issue)
Its been sitting here on my desk, unused for maybe a month, two tops.
With the ram in or out, it does the same thing and I never seen this behavior before. what do I do?
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Reseating the hard drives could help with any loose connections.
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@UnknClone If there is no RAM installed it will always fail to boot with the flashing blue light; that’s expected since there is no RAM (it can’t boot without RAM and can’t initialize video output).
Did you try booting with the DIMMs swapped from their original positions though? Like I said, that will refresh the SPD and memory training caches. It’ll take about a minute to boot before the display comes on, although if you get a flashing blue light again it has given up and can’t boot.
If that doesn’t solve it, I recommend opening a support ticket by emailing support@puri.sm.
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no change with the drive removed.
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Okay, try another display to determine if your monitor is somehow causing the issue. Otherwise, I would follow up with emailing Purism Support.
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ok I did this and it boots with the ram swapped into the second slot.
so the ram works, the drive works, pc works like normal.
so why is the blue light on when ram is in dimm1 and the pc wont boot?
Once the system booted with ram in dimm2, I moved ram back to dimm1 and it wont boot and I get the blue flashy again.
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Great, I’m glad you were able to get it to boot. There’s no downside to having a single DIMM in DIMM2 vs. DIMM1, you can run that way if you are satisfied with it working in this state.
One way or another, it is not able to initialize or train the memory when it’s seated in DIMM1. This could be due to things like debris in the slot, debris along the contacts soldered to the board, or wear on the slot/module (could be a combination of both). Those could prevent a pin from contacting the slot well or cause a short.
It’s strange for something like this to occur with it sitting unused, but certainly not impossible.
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all of which I understand but makes no sense, my pc is clean, clean environment, lid is always on, never dropped the pc, just sits here till I wanna try something new with linux etc.
so I am really confused as to how all of a sudden, it stopped working normally. at this point, you think its possible to get an RMA or something?
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Sure, as long as your are still within the warranty period.
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@UnknClone Please contact support - support@puri.sm - to discuss an RMA. They’ll get information about your order to check warranty status, etc. and discuss options. You can mention this forum thread for context about the problem as well.
If you have another DDR4 SO-DIMM, you might want to try that in DIMM1 to see if the slot works with other modules. It’s still possible it could be a slight wear on the module itself that prevents it from seating in DIMM1.
Re: why did it happen now - It’s entirely understandable how puzzling it is. One possibility is that whatever now prevents memory training from completing on DIMM1 happened before you stopped using the Mini. It may have continued working then because it did not need to re-train memory, the existing training remained valid.
But then after it sat for a long time, for one reason or another it decided that memory training needed to be redone. A lot of this is controlled by Intel FSP (the binary blob that remains in coreboot for all modern Intel platforms). It is frustrating how little visibility into the FSP we have, but I know that FSP can decide to retrain memory based on the current date/time from the real-time clock. At this point the specific problem (whatever it is) came into play, and training couldn’t complete. Now the old training has been discarded too, and it can’t boot. But evidently training with the module in DIMM2 is fine.
It was certainly able to train on DIMM1 once because it worked when we shipped it, otherwise it could never have booted at all with that memory.
That’s certainly not the only possibility, but it’s probably my best guess without hooking up the device for debugging.
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Just curious, what is the typical warrarnty again? I didn’t think extending it would be necessary. I’ll shoot them an email here in the short future. Thanks for the help troubleshooting.
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One year, but you can extend it to three years. Check your order in the Purism Shop using your account to confirm the remaining warranty on the Librem Mini.
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