new beagle board boot questions

Q: Section 12.5 - Factory Boot Verification in the beagle board user
manual implies that there is a USB driver in some sort loaded for RS232
emulation.

I cannot get his to work with WinXP - any suggestions - I'm stuck.

If I press/hold the USER button @ reset or power cycle WinXP says:
"found new device OMAP3430"- and wants a driver - I have no idea where
to get this driver.

Suggestions?

-Duane.

Q: Section 12.5 - Factory Boot Verification in the beagle board user
manual implies that there is a USB driver in some sort loaded for RS232
emulation.

There is no RS232 emulation in the ROM. The USB cable is connected for power purposes. There is an expectation that the serial cable is already connected. This doesn't appear to be clear enough in the documentation.

I cannot get his to work with WinXP - any suggestions - I'm stuck.

If I press/hold the USER button @ reset or power cycle WinXP says:
"found new device OMAP3430"- and wants a driver - I have no idea where
to get this driver.

You can find some information at http://beagleboard.org/project/USB+download/, but I believe it is only for Linux today. The application invoked in the OMAP3530 ROM is only a bootloader, not serial emulation. It is possible to implement serial emulation via USB on the device, but this would need to be in something like u-boot or Linux. The u-boot that is programmed into the flash on the board does not have any USB support.

Suggestions?

Perhaps you could describe what you'd like to get the board to do. It is possible to use Windows to format an SD card and run RAMDISK images fairly easily. For most of the Linux activities, a Linux host is most helpful. It is possible to use 'dd' within Windows to copy SD card images onto the board. The solution I cooked up for ESC was to use a RAMDISK to program the on-board NAND flash, and this has worked reasonably well for most people: http://beagleboard.org/demo/esc#angstrom