Fix for Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit stuck in boot loop

I recently got an Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit, and I read through and followed the Developer Kit Getting Started Guide straight from Nvidia's website.

I downloaded the 7 GB(!) microSD card from their website, and flashed it to a 128 GB microSD card using Balena Etcher.

Then I popped the microSD card into my dev kit board, plugged in HDMI and a USB-C 3A power supply, and waited... I kept seeing a giant NVIDIA logo on my display, and after about 20 seconds, it would seemingly reboot to black screen, then the logo... and repeat forever.

Searching around the Nvidia forums, I eventually found this issue: Nano 2GB boot looping, and finally found the problem: apparently the default image download is only for the 4GB Nano model.

I had used Google/DDG to find the getting started guide, and it linked to the 4GB kit guide—there's an entirely different URL for the 2GB kit!

So I went through that guide, downloaded its image, and flashed it to the microSD card. Now the Nano is booting like a champ.

Why do they have specific images for each RAM size? No clue.

Comments

This is because there is significance difference between 2GB and 4GB Jetson Nano. Even I am working on Jetson Nano 2GB these days (You can check out my blog - GiraffAI) and I have found that 4GB boards have different HW setup than 2GB: For example you will find 2 camera CSI interfaces in 4GB as opposed to just one in 2GB Nano, separate barrel power jack in 4GB, built in Wireless and BT NIC interace that is not present in 2GB and so on. So you can see that the images will be different when you need to support these modules/interaces on 4GB Nano devices.

Thanks for this post, I just had the same problem. I didn't realize there were two versions of board (Newb here), I should have gotten the 4Gb...I wondered why this one was so cheap.