I haven't been able to get my parallella to boot, and now I suspect I will never be able to use it.
I finally sat down to try to figure out why my parallella wouldn't boot up today. I didn't want to wait for my serial to USB cable, so I thought I'd try a couple of tests to see if there was something obviously wrong with the root filesystem. I started by using the Debian 7.0 image 9600-debian7-parallella-190214.img on a 32GB sandisk microSD card. I can mount the root image on Linux, and it looks very normal.
To begin with, using the power supply I bought with my parallella (5VDC 2.5 A), I had a solid green LED, and the left ethernet LED would blink green. I tried multiple ethernet cables and switch ports, but it was the same. I never got the right ethernet LED to come on.
The SD card would get very hot if I left this plugged in. I was planning on trying another SD card but I didn't get a chance to do that yet. SD card still gets very hot.
At one point, I accidentally connected a 9V 650mA supply briefly. That may have been the start of my real problems, I'm not sure, because the further problems didn't occur immediately after that.
Lastly, I plugged in the normal power supply in with no SD card to see if there was any different behavior, and after less than a minute, a wisp of smoke came out of the board. Not sure what burned, specifically.
The SD card still works in my computer. When I power the board on now, it comes up as before, solid green power, left LED blinks. However, now the left LED goes out and stays out after a minute. SD card still gets surprisingly hot (in the Parallella).
I guess my questions are:
Has anyone seen a board behave like what I was initially seeing (solid power LED, left ethernet LED on but no right LED ever)?
Anyone have any ideas on what I can try? Or ideas what I burned up?
If there's not enough information, let me know if there's something I can provide. I may know more when I get the USB serial adapter.