Angstrom Boot without SD Card

GoogleGroups
1

Hi,
     I am interested in flashing my u-boot.bin, uImage, and Angstrom
file system onto the NAND in hopes of being able to boot Angstrom
without the SD card. I tried to follow some of the tutorials but I
think the syntax is a bit off. Being that I don't know much about the
NAND command prompt syntax, could someone offer some advice on the
matter?

     I am working on a Rev C3 board and was attempting to follow the
tutorial here:
http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleNANDFlashing but it
errors out when I try to write on the flash. It appears that am
missing a command or two that allows this to work.

    Is my goal even possible? I know there is a reason why we have to
partition the SD cart with fat32 and ext3, does this cause problems
when trying to run everything off of NAND. I would expect that the
root file system still might need to be on ext3 partition.

    Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Bob

2

I've been working from this tutorial that I found at http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardNAND.
I was able to write to the nand and start the boot process but the
startup hangs at the "Uncompressing Linux...." stage. Does anyone know
why?

Thanks,
Bob

3

Hi,
I am interested in flashing my u-boot.bin, uImage, and Angstrom
file system onto the NAND in hopes of being able to boot Angstrom
without the SD card. I tried to follow some of the tutorials but I
think the syntax is a bit off. Being that I don't know much about the
NAND command prompt syntax, could someone offer some advice on the
matter?

I am working on a Rev C3 board and was attempting to follow the

tutorial here:
Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting. but it
errors out when I try to write on the flash. It appears that am
missing a command or two that allows this to work.

Is my goal even possible? I know there is a reason why we have to
partition the SD cart with fat32 and ext3, does this cause problems
when trying to run everything off of NAND. I would expect that the
root file system still might need to be on ext3 partition.

It should be possible, but most of us are using the SD card route at
the moment. It should be possible though.

Philip

4

The second site I listed has a good tutorial on how to do it, however
when trying to boot from the nand the uImage hangs at the
"Uncompressing Linux..." point. Any ideas? This same uImage boots fine
when booted off of the SD card.

Also through this process I have done something so that the "bootargs"
environmental variable does not exist anymore. Obviously it does exist
somewhere because I can still boot fine off of the mmc card, but I am
not able to access it. I switched out my u-boot.bin file for a demo
one and it's still a problem. Can anyone speak on this?

Thanks,
Bob

5

Hello,

The second site I listed has a good tutorial on how to do it, however
when trying to boot from the nand the uImage hangs at the
"Uncompressing Linux..." point. Any ideas? This same uImage boots fine
when booted off of the SD card.

Are you sure it hangs? Maybe it just doesn't know the console.

Also through this process I have done something so that the "bootargs"
environmental variable does not exist anymore. Obviously it does exist
somewhere because I can still boot fine off of the mmc card, but I am
not able to access it. I switched out my u-boot.bin file for a demo
one and it's still a problem. Can anyone speak on this?

I suggest repairing the bootargs; at least console=ttyS2,115200n8 must
be there for you to debug anything else over the serial port.

I today followed
BeagleBoardNAND - eLinux.org and it
just worked for me on a rev. C3 board.

Regards,

Leon.