Trying to make flash install of my customized Beaglebone Black

Hi,

I’m trying to take the contents of flash that I have working and make a copy of it for distribution.

For instance, you can download a flash imager which will put the default release onto your MMC flash in it’s entirety. I can do that, but then I have to customize to install or configure it to work the way I have chosen for multiple boards. If I could use that flash imager process but have the image it flashes be what I have now, this would be helpful.

I do realize that I can use the dd command as well as connecting a uSD card via a card reader and copy my entire flash over to that uSD and then that uSD will work on another board. That’s a lot slower performing, not my first preference. On the flipside of that, I’m fairly positive that I can NOT boot off of a uSD and then use dd to copy to my MMC flash; maybe I’m wrong there. That would be a good interim solution, but ultimately I think it would be helpful if I could somehow create a flash image where the flasher would just burn my default disk as my starting point for each board, this way an installer person could perform these actions and get repeatable results on multiple boards.

Anyone have any thoughts or know of a set of instructions that might be helpful? Believe me I’ve searched a bit, maybe just used the incorrect terms, I haven’t found anything except the instructions about how to download the default flash image and burn that.

Regards,

  • RT

Well, if your using the newer Debian images hosted here:

http://beagleboard.org/latest-images

There's a little gem, under /opt/scripts/tools/eMMC/*.sh to do what you want.

Regards,

I’m using Angstrom, but I’ll see if I can grab that script and adapt it to work for my case. Thanks for the reference.

  • RT

It's dependent on a variable stored in uEnv.txt and a custom init
script, but otherwise it's just rsync that does all the real work..

Regards,

For reference, the script is hosted here:

https://github.com/RobertCNelson/boot-scripts/blob/master/tools/eMMC/beaglebone-black-make-microSD-flasher-from-eMMC.sh

(that way you don't have to flash the image to get it.)

Regards,

Thanks! Yeah, I’ve been in the process of downloading the .xz file! Actually just finished, but way better than burning an image.

  • RT

I know that you did say this was for Debian, and as stated before I’m using Angstrom.

Any things you can think of that would be gotchas? For instance the location of uEnv.txt is in /boot, not /boot/uboot. So I’m adapting the script, but creating a /boot/uboot subdirectory to copy and place the zImage, initrd.img and any other files. What I’ve also run into is that Angstrom doesn’t have update-initramfs, so I was figuring to install that; it requires that I reconfigure from private network to DHCP and run opkg. But wondering if I’d be heading down a bad direction by trying to adapt that script if it really would match my intent but the intended system is different enough that the details need a lot of changes.