Why did expansion port behave that way? [SOLVED]

admin

Maybe you could try to re-write the legacy version of Armbian. It is automatic expansion, use nmtui to configure wifi should be no problem.

Bazmundi

I did, multiple times.  I changed SD card.  The only time it worked was to use the SD card on a different Orange Pi Zero board.  So a board that had expansion board inserted no longer works with orange pi distro.  
A new board, that has not had the expansion board inserted, works with the orange pi distro.  

The board that doesn't work did work before the expansion board was inserted.  Because a new board works with the same SD then the problem is that the expansion board has somehow damaged the main board.   

The nmtui story is armbian.com distro which would still boot on damaged board but suffered other problems.   

The problems were ethernet connection drop out either on boot or some time after boot (even a day or two).  I worked out that the problem with nmtui locking under armbian.com distro was because the USB connection was dropping out the same way the ethernet connection was dropping out.

So, as two devices were behaving erratically when using the armbian.com distro and the orangepi.org distro wasn't coming up with USB say, then the problem was likely damage to hardware that manifested differently on the two distros.

Regardless the again for the slow readers, the armbian pi zero debian server distro works on a new card but does not work on the card the expansion board was inserted into.

I recommed strongly to people that if you don't need the expansion board then throw it in the bin.