Validation test on Beagleboard

Hello…
I got a new Beagleboard xM- RevC1 recently.
Iam new to the beagleboard and the linux environment.
I was unable to perform the validation test on my new beagleboard.
I followed the steps mentioned in http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleboardRevC3Validation

but when i connect my board through the serial cable to my laptop… some junk characters are displayed in the terminal window.
Could you please help me in this regard.
Please give me the exact step by step procedure, so that i could do beter.
Thank You in advance.

Sounds like either:

  1. You have the incorrect serial port settings on your PC, 115800,n,8,1 no handdshaking
  2. You have the wrong serial cable
  3. The SD card is not inserted and what you are seeing is the ROM looking for a boot source over the serial port.

Gerald

Looks like you are using some old link. This link is not for xM boards.

Use the SD card you received along with board, connect a DVI-D monitor, plug a serial cable and power the board with 5V/2.0A power supply.

-Rao

Same scenario…for me also
Actually…one person in our team has formatted the SD card it by mistake… i guess…during HP formatting…
so pls tell the steps using any new SD card.
Thanks in advance…:

I have the non-XM BB, but here are some notes I put together for creating a bootable sd card, should be the same procedure:

  1. Prepare a bootable Linux SD card: first use the ubuntu disk utility to clear the sd card. Then run the automated script “sudo sh omap3-mkcard.sh /dev/mmcblk0” (script found here http://www.slimlogic.co.uk/2011/05/omap3-sd-booting/, manual procedure here http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardBeginners). Copy tarball to linux partition of the SD card (script names it Angstrom): sudo cp tarball /media/Angstrom. Extract in place: sudo tar -zxvf tarball. This is if the tarball extension is tar.gz, use -jxvf if the extension is .tar. Copy boot files to the boot partition in this order: cp /media/Angstrom/boot/MLO /media/boot. Then uboot.bin, then uImage. Note that in the Angstrom/boot folder these are symbolic links, but executing the cp command this way copies the file itself with the name of the symlink. Boot args: boot.cmd (the source file) is turned into boot.scr by the mkimage program. The narcissus image generator (http://narcissus.angstrom-distribution.org/) generates the tarball mentioned above. The .cmd and corresponding .scr files are in the /boot/u-boot-scripts folder. I copied the uboot-beagleboard-validation-boot.cmd.scr to the boot partition and linux booted fine.