I'm unable to boot from duplicated SD card - help please

Hi,

New member here. I’ve had a BeagleBone for a couple of weeks and really like it. I’ve been running Ubuntu on it with great success. I wanted to duplicate the SD card as both a backup, and to have additional images that I can experiment on without having to lose the original.

I’ve been using dd in my Ubuntu laptop to copy the image. After inserting and unmounting the source SD I’ve done this:

dd if=/dev/sdc of=ubuntu_bone.img

That works fine. Then to write to an SD of the exact same size and make:

dd if=ubuntu_bone.img of=/dev/sdc

It takes a long time, but it succeeds. Unfortunately when I put the newly created SD copy in the BeagleBone it will not boot. No flashing lights or anything. So I take it out, put the source SD back in and it starts putting within a few seconds.

I tried some dd parms, like block size, for both the reading in and copying out, but it made no difference.

Any suggestions on what I may be missing or doing wrong would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jake

The boot partition is pretty picky, sometimes dd alone isn't enough..
Rerun the script you originally used to create the ubuntu image on the
2nd card and just tar/untar the rootfs partition from the good to the
new..

Regards,

Thanks Robert. I’ll try that.

Success! Thank you Robert!

BTW, the tar process ran in a few minutes, verses the few hours a dd of 16G SD required.

Jake

Success! Thanks Robert!

Sorry about the double post. I don’t know what and the heck is going on with my browser and using this group! :slight_smile:

Raj,

I had built my own Ubuntu kernel using instructions on this blog:

http://fleshandmachines.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/beaglebone-on-ubuntu-11-04/

You need to un-comment the “CC” line for arm in the system.sh file before compiling. That allows cross-compile to arm.

I then ran the install_image.sh script, which creates the boot partition and the rootfs on the SD card.