BBB won't boot with sdCard in place

GoogleGroups
1

Howdy,

I’ve been using on board Angstrom on my tethered BBB; rsh and can compile, set date, etc. Attached ethernet and can rsh from my laptop. Most excellent.

Picked up a couple of 32B micro SDCards, but BBB won’t boot with them installed:

  1. Power off, insert FAT32 formated card in slot
  2. Apply power (not trying to boot, no buttons pressed)
  3. Get power LED, and all of the user LEDs lit. Nothiing else happens

I assumed a power issue from the microUSB (attached to a MAC). Picked up a AdaFruit 276 1A power supply. Same results:

  • Only power supply and ethernet cable attached:
  1. Boot with no sd card inserted - no problem
  2. Boot with any sd card inserted - all LEDs lit, nothing happens.

Am I doing something wrong?

Suggestions?

Randy

2

Forgot to add that I can insert, mount and inspect the same card after the BBB is up and running. The issue is that I can’t power on boot with a card installed.

Randy

3

Howdy,

I’ve been using on board Angstrom on my tethered BBB; rsh and can compile, set date, etc. Attached ethernet and can rsh from my laptop. Most excellent.

Picked up a couple of 32B micro SDCards, but BBB won’t boot with them installed:

  1. Power off, insert FAT32 formated card in slot
  2. Apply power (not trying to boot, no buttons pressed)
  3. Get power LED, and all of the user LEDs lit. Nothiing else happens

I assumed a power issue from the microUSB (attached to a MAC). Picked up a AdaFruit 276 1A power supply. Same results:

  • Only power supply and ethernet cable attached:
  1. Boot with no sd card inserted - no problem
  2. Boot with any sd card inserted - all LEDs lit, nothing happens.

Am I doing something wrong?

You need a serial cable attached as a console so that you can see where the boot it is failing. Since the LEDs light up tells us that u-boot is working but little else. We need the console log to see what is wrong.

Regards,
John

4

Can I do so via the USB cable, or do I need a ‘real’ serial cable? Can you point me to instructions as I haven’t done that before?

Thanks,

Randy

5

I just ordered a AdaFruit debug cable. I’ll give it a try when it comes in and report what u-boot has to say.

Randy

6

I figured it out - my BBB is always trying to boot from the SB card, if one is installed, and I didn’t copy a correct bootable image on the card. I used dd to copy the latest image and it booted fine. Thanks!