[beagleboard] Reinstalling Angstrom on Beaglebone

Hi there,

Yesterday I bought a beagleboard rev A5 and this is my first embedded linux experience. Also I do not know much about any kind of unix based operating systems.

Anyways, today while I was updating my beagleboard something went wrong I guess. Because when I connected to device after updating&upgrading process, angstrom was not booting anymore and I do not have any backup. Therefore I decided to reinstall angstrom by following the steps explained under subject “How to Unpack and BOot the Demo Image - easy way” at http://angstrom.s3.amazonaws.com/demo/beaglebone/index.html. However, now I have a few questions:

  1. While unpacking the image to the raw BeagleBone SD card, I used /dev/sdb as output target. However it is not something done with conscious. I do not know how to figure out which port my sd card is attached to. How can I understand which one I should use? (sda, sda1,sda2,sdb,sdb1… etc)

Lots of how-to articles on this on the web. Use ‘dmesg | tail’ to see what the last drive added is. This requires you to insert your card just before issuing the command.

  1. It has been 3.5 hours since I started unpacking process. Does it take this long or is it because I choose wrong output target address? Also I see lots of meaningless characters on the screen. Is it normal? (Check out the attachment)

That isn’t normal. What exact command did you issue?

  1. I did not format SD card. Because it was not listed under “How to Unpack and BOot the Demo Image - easy way” guide. Is not it necessary? Aren’t I only unzipping angstrom image to SD card? If so, why do not I delete nonworking angstrom image?

You don’t need to delete or format from Linux.

Thank you for your help:

I used: xz -dkc Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2011.10-core-beaglebone-r0.img.xz > /dev/sdb to unpack the content.

Thank you for your help:

I used: xz -dkc
Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2011.10-core-beaglebone-r0.img.xz > /dev/sdb
to unpack the content.

Do you have the output of `dmesg` showing that /dev/sdb is actually
your SD card? Any reason you are using such an old image? Are you
trying to get back to that state?