From “Release_Notes_for_Debian_Image55.pdf” in the “Known Issues / Limitation” section there is “Eth0 cannot be assigned IP address”. So be sure to connect the network cable to Eth1, (I am about 95% sure that is the Network port closest to the HDMI port.).
Also from the Image55 release notes “Known Issues / Limitation” section is “Boot flow(boot from SD or eMMC) are not supported yet”, so if you are using that image the only boot switch setting which will work is “Flash” - both switches moved closer to the RAM in the middle of the board and further away from the edge of the board.
The third thing is to powerup the board and just leave it there for say 5 minutes, go have a coffee, then check for blinking LED’s. It could be stuck there waiting on a timeout, and you are powering it off before it timesout. Full disclosure, I should probably add that I have no VF2 hardware yet, but the above is the steps I would take in your exact situation.
One problem I had years ago with a particularly cheap HDMI cable was that it only worked one way around, if I plugged it in the other way around I got a blank screen! Needless to say that cable was binned fast.
EDIT: From my basic understanding there are 4 main stages (5 if you count OpenSBI which is loaded with u-boot) to the boot process:
- ROM-> CPU L1 cache (32 KiB) binary is 32 KiB
- spl-u-boot->CPU L2 Cache (2 MiB) binary is typically about 125~140 KiB
- u-boot->main DDR RAM (2/4/8 GiB) binary is typically about 2.7 MiB
- kernel->main DDR RAM (2/4/8 GiB) binary manages all the RAM
As far as I know those two switch tell the CPU where it should attempt to load the spl-u-boot from.