That’s a lot! I see why you are tired. You may have several unrelated issues going on here. Let’s focus on one at a time. Neither of those machines have been reported working on our user provided Known Good Hardware list.
Keep in Mind that StartOS is designed for, and tested by us, only on machines that we sell. If you choose to run StartOS on untested hardware, you are the test case, and we appreciate you.
We’re likely going to retrace some steps you may have already done. This will be necessary to get a bearing on what’s going on. We’ll also have to work on this over a number of days, as some of the processes will take a long time. Let’s focus on the Geekom A5, With StartOS 0.3.5.1-nonfree. If this is not already installed, please do so. We don’t want to be running “almost beta” software when troubleshooting. You can upgrade to 0.4.0 later, as we get into our public beta stage. After installing the OS, install, configure, and start Bitcoin. Please let me know what edition you are running, and if you have set any specific config options. For the 16 GB machine, I’d recommend settings the Database Cache to 12288 MB during the IBD. This is not absolutely necessary, but it will speed up the verify process. The down side is, a hard power cycle will be more likely to cause corruption, so we need to be careful about that. Make sure you have stable power! I’d recommend against installing anything else while we are troubleshooting. At the first sign on trouble, I’d like to see the Bitcoin logs.