Unbricking my beaglebone black

Greetings,

I am having a great deal of difficulty getting Wheezy Debian on the BBB. I read and performed the booting instructions that called for holding the boot button down until the four tiny LED lights illuminated and started turning off and on at random levels. I did this several times with it failing. This process when for HOURS about three before I stopped it. My board does not boot anymore and I think I might have bricked it. Is there any way to recover from this? I read some posts about unbricking it but they were for Angstom and I have no idea what is on the flash at this point and time. Can anyone give me a starting point and a direction? A simple test to figure out what is on the board and how to get back to square one? Thank you

Greetings,

I am having a great deal of difficulty getting Wheezy Debian on the BBB. I read and performed the booting instructions that called for holding the boot button down until the four tiny LED lights illuminated and started turning off and on at random levels. I did this several times with it failing. This process when for HOURS about three before I stopped it. My board does not boot anymore and I think I might have bricked it. Is there any way to recover from this? I read some posts about unbricking it but they were for Angstom and I have no idea what is on the flash at this point and time. Can anyone give me a starting point and a direction? A simple test to figure out what is on the board and how to get back to square one? Thank you

First off, you can not brick the beaglebone black.

From the sounds of things, it sounds like you’ve been unsuccessfully using a flasher image. Which has by now probably rendered the eMMC non bootable.

Try this image: https://rcn-ee.com/rootfs/bb.org/release/2015-11-03/console/bone-debian-7.9-console-armhf-2015-11-03-2gb.img.xz

Which is listed here: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack_Debian#2015-11-03

Anyhow, that is a standalone image, and will boot from sdcard. Get the Beaglebone booting from that first. First try booting it without holding down the boot button, but if for some reason it does hang at boot:

  1. power the board down.
  2. press, and hold down the boot button.
  3. Apply power
  4. Continue holding down boot button until you see USR0 beat in a “heartbeat” flashing pattern.

you forgot the most important thing.

you cannot flash a BBB when powered by USB

you need a decent external 5v power supply

except, I’m not talking about flashing the eMMC.

Greetings,

I downloaded the image and used a 2A 5V power supply ( Ever post seemed to stress that point) and sucessfully got to the login for the OS. Good news and thank you sir. Now, to load the image into the eMMC I hold the boot button down and wait for all four LED’s to light up? I was doing that but The four lights flickered for sometimes four hours and showed no signs of stopping whereas all the tutorials said it would take at max 1.5 hours. Is there a certain type of image that is compiled specifically for flashing into the eMMC?

Thanks again

Bill

Unless the file has the words "eMMC-flasher" it's just running the OS.

follow:

http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack_Debian#Flashing_eMMC

to convert a non-flasher to a flasher..

Regards,