My BeagleBoard Rev C4 will not boot with an SD Card

Hi all and thanks in advance,

I recently purchased a BeagleBoard and am trying to run Angstrom on it
for a Senior Design project. When I boot the board with no SD Card it
output this to the serial port:
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Feb 19 2009 - 12:01:24)
Loading u-boot.bin from nand

U-Boot 2009.11-rc1-00601-g3aa4b51 (Jan 05 2010 - 20:56:38)

OMAP3530-GP ES3.1, CPU-OPP2 L3-165MHz
OMAP3 Beagle board + LPDDR/NAND
I2C: ready
DRAM: 256 MB
NAND: 256 MiB
*** Warning - bad CRC or NAND, using default environment

In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Board revision C4
Die ID #783c002400000000040365fa12012012
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
No MMC card found
Booting from nand ...

NAND read: device 0 offset 0x280000, size 0x400000
4194304 bytes read: OK
Wrong Image Format for bootm command
ERROR: can't get kernel image!
OMAP3 beagleboard.org #

As far as I know this is the expected output. However once an SD Card
is placed in the board it hangs at:
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Feb 19 2009 - 12:01:24)

When I hold the USER button while powering it on I get:
...40W......

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Feb 19 2009 - 12:01:24)

I have followed several tutorials to the letter when it comes to
formatting the SD Card in both Windows (XP) and Linux (Ubuntu and
Knopix). The most Recent one that I followed was
http://www.openismus.com/documents/linux/embedded/beagleboard_getting_started.shtml.

The thing that bothers me the most is that the board won't even
attempt to boot from NAND when an SD Card is in. Any ideas why I
cannot seem to boot while an SD Card in the board?

What happens if you boot into U-Boot from NAND, then insert
the SD card and run the 'mmcinit' command?

One issue might be that you did not format the card correctly. It must have a FAT partition in the first part of the card and the files must be copied in a specific order. Have you looked a the recovery page and followed the steps there to make sure the card is set up correctly?

http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleboardRevCValidationv3

Gerald

Gerald Coley, I have followed the steps provided for validating the
BeagleBoard specifically Rev C4 and it behaved the same as I posted. I
copied the 6 files in order to the SD Card formatted as specified.

Gary Thomas, when I run 'mmc init' it hangs:
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Feb 19 2009 - 12:01:24)
Loading u-boot.bin from nand

U-Boot 2009.11-rc1-00601-g3aa4b51 (Jan 05 2010 - 20:56:38)

OMAP3530-GP ES3.1, CPU-OPP2 L3-165MHz
OMAP3 Beagle board + LPDDR/NAND
I2C: ready
DRAM: 256 MB
NAND: 256 MiB
*** Warning - bad CRC or NAND, using default environment

In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Board revision C4
Die ID #783c002400000000040365fa12012012
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
OMAP3 beagleboard.org # mmc init

Gary Thomas wrote:

OK. Sounds like you are at a dead end. I suggest you request an RMA and get it looked at.

Gerald

I had the same problem, going through many different recovery tutorials and finally landing on the link posted above, and still nothing. Then out of dumb luck I did the exact same steps on a 2nd SD card and it started working, so you might try that before dealing with the whole RMA process.
–Deric

I have seen some SD cards not able to boot if you use FAT32. I have no idea as to why. You can try just formatting them to FAT and see if that helps.

Gerald

...That and stay with a 2 GB card or smaller.

- dan

Thank all of you for your quick input. I have been trying these steps
on a Kingston 2GB MicroSD Card with Adapter, as well as a 4GB full
sized SD Card from a friends camera. Neither have worked and I have
been unable to get a smaller card. Later today I will try both a FAT16
and a FAT12 on the 2GB SD Card and post the results from each of them.

When using fdisk, which partition type should I be using? Out of the
list below I would expect to use 1 for FAT12 and e for FAT16. is this
right?

0 Empty 1c Hidden W95 FAT3 70 DiskSecure Mult bb Boot Wizard hid
1 FAT12 1e Hidden W95 FAT1 75 PC/IX be Solaris boot
2 XENIX root 24 NEC DOS 80 Old Minix c1 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
3 XENIX usr 39 Plan 9 81 Minix / old Lin c4 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
4 FAT16 <32M 3c PartitionMagic 82 Linux swap c6 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
5 Extended 40 Venix 80286 83 Linux c7 Syrinx
6 FAT16 41 PPC PReP Boot 84 OS/2 hidden C: da Non-FS data
7 HPFS/NTFS 42 SFS 85 Linux extended db CP/M / CTOS / .
8 AIX 4d QNX4.x 86 NTFS volume set de Dell Utility
9 AIX bootable 4e QNX4.x 2nd part 87 NTFS volume set df BootIt
a OS/2 Boot Manag 4f QNX4.x 3rd part 8e Linux LVM e1 DOS access
b W95 FAT32 50 OnTrack DM 93 Amoeba e3 DOS R/O
c W95 FAT32 (LBA) 51 OnTrack DM6 Aux 94 Amoeba BBT e4 SpeedStor
e W95 FAT16 (LBA) 52 CP/M 9f BSD/OS eb BeOS fs
f W95 Ext'd (LBA) 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux a0 IBM Thinkpad hi ee EFI GPT
10 OPUS 54 OnTrackDM6 a5 FreeBSD ef EFI (FAT-12/16/
11 Hidden FAT12 55 EZ-Drive a6 OpenBSD f0 Linux/PA-RISC b
12 Compaq diagnost 56 Golden Bow a7 NeXTSTEP f1 SpeedStor
14 Hidden FAT16 <3 5c Priam Edisk a8 Darwin UFS f4 SpeedStor
16 Hidden FAT16 61 SpeedStor a9 NetBSD f2 DOS secondary
17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 63 GNU HURD or Sys ab Darwin boot fd Linux raid
auto
18 AST SmartSleep 64 Novell Netware b7 BSDI fs fe LANstep
1b Hidden W95 FAT3 65 Novell Netware b8 BSDI swap ff BBT

Use FAT16.

Gerald

...Or use the 'HP USB disk storage format tool'.

- dan

Why don't you try dd-ing an image from Narcissus - it will take care
of all formatting issues

The HP utility for formating the drive is only showing me FAT32 and
NTFS. I have tried the FAT32 to no avail.

As for a Narcissus build, that was the first thing that I tried.
However I could not find enough information about it to be sure that I
was doing it right. The file that it kept generating was for a 1GB SD
Card. From what I understand all that you need to do is untar the
image to get sd.img and run 'dd -if ./sd.img -of /dev/sdc'. Am I
missing any steps? Can you put a 1GB image on a 2GB SD Card?

Thanks again for all of your replies.

sm1810 wrote:

And still use FAT16.

Gerald

I just finished trying FAT16 and FAT12 using fdisk both with and
without setting the boot flag. The partition types that I selected
were 1, 6, and e. To make the file system I typed, "mkfs.vfat -F 16 /
dev/sdc1 -n BeagleBoot" where sdc1 is the node of the only partition
on the card, and I used "-F 12" when I formatted it to a FAT12.

I also downloaded the older version of the HP tool (v. 2.0.6) and
formatted the card to FAT, but that did not work either.

If I get an RMA will they just send it back to me fixed or will they
refund me? Because I am on a very tight schedule and am thinking that
I might just have to order another one.

The RMA team will check out the board and repair or replace it. They can put it on a fast track. They do not handle the refunds. That will need to come from the distributor that sold it to you.

Gerald

Thanks for all of you guys help. I just ordered a new board and am
going to try to get a refund for the old one. When I get the new board
I will update this post with whether or not it works.

Regards,
Jason

Gerald Coley wrote:

I just got the new board in and it worked like a charm. Looks like it
was a faulty board.

Thanks for everyone's feedback.