Junk characters printing on console

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1

Hi All,

Yesterday My beagle board stopped working. Even LEDs also not glowing.
I followed the link
http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBoard#Image_Files

i copied the Angstrom Linux files to SD card and tried boot. For that
I did like this way. First I hold down USER button and i connected to
5v Power supply, after that on console some junk characters printed
after that nothing happens.

Please give me your suggestion to bring my board up..

2

Junk characters means that the SD card is not being read, the NAND is gone, and it is looking for a serial boot source. Is the D5 LED glowing?

Gerald

3

Hi gerald,

Yes D5 LED is glowing. Can you some info regarding serial boot
source...

4

I don’t see this as a SW code issue. Most likley you did not follow the instructions correctly to create the image on the SD card. In other words, it is not running any code from the SD card, but instead only the code in the ROM is running. It cannot find a boot source.

Gerald

5

Hi Gerald,

After that issue i reformatted my SD card and copied the files which
mentioned in link
http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleboardRevC3Validation

But Still my Beagle board not booting and USR LEDs also not glowing.
What do you suggest regarding this??

6

I can’t see exactly what you are doing. Can you provide a printout from the serial port to see how far it gets?

You can also follow the procedure found here using the Windows method:

http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBoard#Image_Files

Under Linux if you format the card, you need to make it bootable.

Gerald

7

Oh...

Every time i am formatting my SD card under Linux only. After that i
m copying the required files. May be that is a problem. How could i
make my SD card as bootable??

8

Mark ti as bootable using a Linux format tool. I use Ubuntu desktop. There may be a command to mark it as bootable but I am not familiar with Linux all that much.

Gerald

9

In fdisk, the 'a' command will toggle the 'bootable' flag on a partition. You should see a '*' in the 'Boot' column after this when running 'p' to print the partition table.

A bootable SD card partition map (in fdisk) might look like this (from one of the micro SD cards supplied with my Bone):

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3904 MB, 3904897024 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 474 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

         Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/mmcblk0p1 * 1 9 72261 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 10 444 3494137+ 83 Linux

-Andrew