Beaglebone connection failures

So I have a beaglebone A3 device. I downloaded the new images (image form 7/20/2013) and drivers for windows 7 64bit, serial/usb all according to the start up guide.
Now my problem sometimes it works and I can connect to the board using ssh, cloud9, and the web site 192.168.7.2.
But sometimes I can’t. It is very frustrating. Is there something missing from the start up guide. My application needs to be

tethered via the usb. Please help.

Can we all assume that this is a BeagleBone Black?

Gerald

until you come up with something better than "sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt. no one is going to help you. Because they cant.

I would come up with something better, but that’s what happens.
Sometimes it connects and sometimes it does not. If I reboot it may connect. The usb connection shows that it is not connected.

If I might make a suggestion.

http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBone#Known_Issues

Gerald

Thanks Gerald.

Bill,

Which error do you get through windows ( I’ll assume puTTY?) When you try to connect, and it fails ?

William,
Thanks for your question.
I do use putty. This just gives me the normal putty:
Network error: Connection timed out.
Attached is what my network adapter looks like.

Untitled.jpg

Ok so that seems to indicate the an SSH server is not running on the BBB. Or possibly for some reason the BBB did not take 192.168.7.2 as an IP. Or perhaps you might need to wait a little bit longer for the SSH server to start up. I did notice myself that dropbear ( the default angstrom SSH server i believe ) would take up to around 2 minutes to be finished loading and ready to go.

Short of this, there is not much to go on. One way to trouble shoot the issue would be to get a serial debug cable, connected and working to the BBB. Then you could dmesg | grep ssh or some such and hopefully get closer to what the actual problem is. Sorry if this is not enough for you to go by, but it is really hard to figure out what is going on without more information.

Other potential problems could be as simple as a USB cable that sometimes works or sometimes doesnt. Loose USB connector( on either end), etc.

So I finally got it to work thanks for your suggestions William Hermans.
I saw some old drivers on my server. I removed them and now it seems to be working.
Like I said it works sometimes especially when rebooted. I will try a few more times to see if it is still working.

So it stopped working. I checked to see what drivers it was using:
It is using c:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\mdismpx.sys
c:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\usb8023x.sys
I thought it should be using 64bit drivers. How can I get it to use the 64bit drivers?
I think this might be my problem.
Any thoughts?

HI Bill,

Sorry to hear that it stopped working. The drivers you’re using are the same drivers my system uses as well. Which is also Windows 7 x64, though my copy is the enterprise version.

Anyway, one thing you can try, but is not guaranteed to work. You can try uninstalling the drivers through control panel add/remove programs, then re-install. A couple of things to take note of before you do that however.

First make sure your copy of windows is fully updated through Windows update. That is before you reinstall the drivers.

Second, you can right click the driver install executable and select “run as administrator”. Sometimes this can help other times it does not, but could be worth a try.

Passed that I really do not have much else to offer for advice. RNDIS from Angstrom to Windows always seemed to work fine for me. Granted I did not use RNDIS, or Angstrom long, I have however experienced similar issues between Debian/Linux with RNDIS to Windows. I am not sure exactly what the problem is, but if I ping the Windows host from the BBB ( I have Ethernet connected too ) it will start working again. For a brief period of time.

For what it is worth. the issue i have With Debian to Windows could possibly be a network metrics issue. Just happened to think of that just now, but yeah I do not really know for sure.

I have the same problem. I dont have a serial to usb cable to debug the problem. I finally switched to Ubuntu and the issue never appeared again.

.

i have a beaglebone black A5, i had the exact same problem when i am booting up from the SD card, however when i am booting up from the emmc it works fine, i tried formatting and re-installing the image but no avail . please help.

Sure is large font. Did you try the support Wiki?.

Gerald

i work with a beaglebone (white) and i am having the same problem with windows and ubuntu. sometimes i have to push the reset button on my beaglebone up to 10 times or even more to get it working, all the time observing system settings/network on ubuntu and wating to finally get a “connected” … this is frustrating! so it doesn’t seem to be a problem with windows.