Unable to boot from MMC

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1

Hi,

I'm new to Beagle board and when I was following the board validation
I found that I couldn't boot from MMC. I've searched this group and
read the previous thread about MMC problem, didn't solve mine.

I'm using a Toshiba SD card (2G), formatted following the formatting
instruction.

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 2013 MB, 2013265920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 244 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xce99a035

        Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/mmcblk0p1 * 1 244 1959898+ c W95 FAT32
(LBA)

there is only 1 partition, it's bootable. I copied MLO *first* into
this blank SD card (MLO downloaded from the link from the previous MMC
discussion thread), then copied x-load.bin.ift, flash-uboot.bin, u-
boot.bin, rd-ext2.bin, and uImage onto the card.

I pressed the user button and plugged in the power. The serial output
showed:

40T

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.41
Starting OS Bootloader...

U-Boot 1.3.3-00035-gab55ae5-dirty (Jun 16 2008 - 17:35:22)

OMAP3530-GP rev 2, CPU-OPP2 L3-165MHz
OMAP3 Beagle Board + LPDDR/NAND
DRAM: 128 MB
NAND: 256 MiB
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Audio Tone on Speakers ... complete

Whereas the output should have been:
40T

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.41
Starting on with MMC
Reading boot sector

When I do coninfo, only serial showed up:
List of available devices:
serial 80000003 SIO stdin stdout stderr

If I boot the kernel and do a mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/mmc, it works
and I can access the SD card, but if I don't boot the kernel I
couldn't access the SD card, I couldn't boot from it either. How do I
make sure it's actually scanning the SD and "tried" to boot from it?
Did I miss out something here?

Thanks for any thoughts.

2

Steves MLO tree (http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/~koen/MLO-
beagleboard-1.42+r7+git73eb0caf065b3b3f407d8af5c4836624e5cc7b69-r7)
has output on serial on what it scanned and tried to boot. You could
give that one a try.

regards,

Koen

3

Hi Koen,

Thanks for your reply.

I loaded the file on your page onto my SD card and named it MLO to
replace the old one.
Somehow the output didn't seem to change.
I'm still getting:

40T

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.41
Starting OS Bootloader...

U-Boot 1.3.3-00035-gab55ae5-dirty (Jun 16 2008 - 17:35:22)

OMAP3530-GP rev 2, CPU-OPP2 L3-165MHz
OMAP3 Beagle Board + LPDDR/NAND
DRAM: 128 MB
NAND: 256 MiB
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Audio Tone on Speakers ... complete

If I don't press the user button, the string "40T" doesn't get
printed. If i do, it does, but Beagle still boots from OS Bootloader.

I must have missed out something fundamental?

4

Hi,

If I don't press the user button, the string "40T" doesn't get
printed. If i do, it does, but Beagle still boots from OS Bootloader.

I must have missed out something fundamental?

I had something similar when I forgot to turn on the boot flag on the
MMC card. It is necessary.

Regards,

Job

5

Thanks for your reply.

Please see my previous post:

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 2013 MB, 2013265920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 244 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xce99a035

        Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/mmcblk0p1 * 1 244 1959898+ c W95 FAT32
(LBA)

Is this the boot flag you are talking about? I believe this says I've
turned it on, unless I misunderstood it.

Also as a consequence I'm not able to boot from UART or USB.
When I run the USB load program, it says "Found device" but then
"Couldn't write config"
When I run the serial load program, it never sees the ASIC ID.

Has anyone seen anything similar?

6

The behavior you are seeing indicates that the boot rom doesn't like
something about the way your mmc card is set up. If it doesn't find
things to its liking, it moves on to look for x-load in nand.

I would first try to repartition and reformat your mmc card. Follow
the steps precisely, the boot rom seems to be picky. We don't have
access to the source code, so it is hard to say why that is.

If that doesn't work you might want to try a different brand/size mmc card.

As to your peripheral boot issue: you can eliminate the config error
message by running the download utility with sudo.

However you shouldn't waste your time -- the MLO/x-load.bin.ift
binaries are *not* compatible with peripheral boot. They require an
*unsigned* binary, and in addition the current x-load sources have
another issue that prevents even an unsigned binary from working.

If you are really desperate to use peripheral boot let me know and I
can send you a binary that will work.

Regards,

Steve

7

I had problems getting my 2GB SD card formatted due to an older card reader.
It did format the card, and the data could be read, but the format wasn't ok.
Upgrading the card reader and following the SD formatting instructions made
it work fine (first format to one big VFAT partition and then repartition to
a VFAT boot and an ext3 root partition).