Guys . . it’s not the boot bit, and it’s not the virtual machine. I use virtualbox all_the_time and have no such issues.
@Phil
What sdcard reader does your laptop have in it ? Name brand, and type. Chances are pretty good that you’re just unaware of how to setup such devices in the virtualbox config. However, it’s not garunteed. Some( a very few ) devices refuse to work no matter what you do. But I’ve yet to personally run into one that won’t. Out of the last 3 laptops I’ve owned over the last 8 or so years . . .
Anyhow if i can get the above information from you, I can probably help you out in setting it up correctly.
So short version. . .
Virtualbox main screen → click settings.
subsection “USB” → click it.
On the USB filter section - Far right - Click the second from the top icon that looks like a pen with a plus sign on it.
From here, a fly out will popup listing the USB devices virtualbox sees. If your card reader is like most, and is USB based, it should be listed here. Granted, it may be listed as “unknown device” in which case you’ll have to experiment and find out which device it is. I would highly recommend disconnecting all other USB storage devices when doing this. To avoid complications related to finding your actual card reader.
Once enabling a USB filter on a specific device, click OK, and restart / start your virtual machine. Test / check until you’ve found the right device.
Also, for the record Win32imager is garbage, and is one reason why I recommend setting up either a real machine, or virtual machine with Linux ( preferably Debian ) when developing for the beaglebone black.
There is also another options Phil. You can use the beaglebone to write the image for you. It’s kind of convoluted, but you can build the image on your virtual machine, then use sshfs or some other method to transfer the file to the beaglebone. This is of course assuming you’re able to boot from eMMC.
Ah, but I keep forgetting . . . I can do this personally because I boot NFS root . . . with tons of additional space left. So unles you’re able to get NFS root working, or use a USB thumb( USB host on the BBB ) drive this won’t work.
Win32Imager definitely works better for my setup (and resulted in a bootable SD card). I’m happy leaving the VM out of this part of the process - detection and mounting of USB devices that get transferred to it from the host is INCREDIBLY hit-or-miss on this VM.
First pass at running with a card processed by Win32Imager resulted in failure (but I neglected to save out the logs). It booted (yay) and looked like it had gotten just to where it wanted to begin writing from the image on the USB stick and failed there with a kernel panic.
After that, I tried booting off of a flasher image uSD card, but apparently the EEPROM had not been successfully written prior to the failure.
Re-built my USB stick and tried again, and it /looks/ like it’s going better:
- Serial monitor shows an fsck failure , but it continued (“error 2 (no such file or directory) while executing fsck.ext4 for /dev/mmcblk0p1”)
- Serial monitor stopped on “B” with the USR LED’s cycling back and forth in a “hey, world, I’m copying your image!” way that I like to see.
LED’s eventually settled at “all on”, so I’ve powered down, pulled the uSD cards, put power back in and it /looks/ like it’s running from the LEDs, but
- No output on the serial console
After one more hard power cycle (failed to respond to power button) the USB network adapter showed up in Windows (still no console output?) and I can SSH into the board.
I think that’s got me running - now to verify it on a few more boards in my pile.
Much thanks, Robert.
Sound like you have it under control then. Glad you got it working. A couple of side notes . . .
I use Debian Wheezy i386 ( 32bit ) for all my dev machines for the beaglebone. Have had great success with all. Virtual machine, or real. However, I do not use X at all. Just a basic command line interface.
Also I did not think through what I was saying about sshfs . . . with sshfs, you mount a remote file system, so technically, you could mount the home directory in your virtual machine, and run tools like dd, bmap, or whatever on the file - remotely. It might be a little slower, but it should work.
Good luck Phil !
Robert,
It’s been a while on this, but can you re-post the flasher img.xz someplace (bone-debian-7.8-lxde-4gb-armhf-2015-03-01-4gb.img.xz)?
I see you’ve taken it down from your website and my backup copy no longer validates correctly. Since this is actually a pretty valuable tool, is there a way that it could be posted up permanantly on one of the Beaglebone websites or GitHub pages?
-phil
Hi Phil,
I have an archive site now hosted at dreamhost: (taking full advantage of
their "unlimited" space...)
https://rcn-ee.online/rootfs/bb.org/
to relieve "disk space" pressure on my linode host (rcn-ee.net)..
Regards,
Thanks! Turns out my manufacturing folks were having some PEBKAC errors anyway, but thanks for pointing me to the new host.
Is there any substantive difference between the USB Flasher images from various points in the Testing directory tree?
Oh, just weekly snapshots... The latest the better...
We are getting close to cutting a new jessie/v4.1.x/lxqt release for seeed..
Regards,
Robert, so which is the blank eeprom flasher ?
Oh they are there, too... But since the 'blank' eeprom flasher's overwrite
the board eeprom, the oem's need to contact me directly.. and i can point
them directly to the image and tweak they need to do..
With all the clones today, the days of just "BeagleBone Black" 100% clone
blank eeprom are over. 
Regards,
Oh they are there, too… But since the ‘blank’ eeprom flasher’s overwrite the board eeprom, the oem’s need to contact me directly… and i can point them directly to the image and tweak they need to do…
With all the clones today, the days of just “BeagleBone Black” 100% clone blank eeprom are over. 
Regards,
Yeah, I read the instructions above. So I’m curious though. Is the eeprom any different between say circuitco, and element14 BBB’s ? I suppose I could dump, and diff ( if i was sure I knew how to dump correctly ).
It should not be. But, then again…
Gerald
Thanks Gerald, and Robert. So yeah it does look different, however . . . I can not think of a reason why a beagleboard.org eeprom would fail on an element14 board. I mean they both have exactly the same hardware as far as device tree goes, yeah ?
I mean, in the long run, I’m not sure this is really an important question, but is something I think is good to know. Also I was expecting something more complex for an eeprom “string”, but heh, serves me right for “thinking”
Or wait, I guess I was comparing the white’s eeprom to the blacks eeprom, so they look the same. Yeah, writing a white eeprom to a black eeprom would be bad haha 
Good evening Robert,
Sorry for resurrecting an old thread but I’m trying to find the ‘blank eeprom flasher’, and I was wondering if what you said here was still in effect. I’m working on a project, I’ve designed a board based on your Beagleboard Black, but it’s not to be sold as-is, but rather used in a single specific way. So no clone from me, but I still need to find a way to program the blank eeprom and the blank eMMC. Also, I’m using the Octavo cpu, but still have a LAN controller, no WiFi.
Thank you,
Ben
It's not my board..
Grab this image:
https://rcn-ee.net/rootfs/bb.org/testing/2018-06-01/console/a335-eeprom-debian-8.10-console-armhf-2018-06-01-1gb.img.xz
it'll get you to the u-boot prompt.
From their you can program your eeprom..
There's a few macros already define, for example for bbb clone:
run eeprom_dump; run eeprom_blank; run eeprom_bbb_header; run eeprom_dump; reset
You can see how it's done here:
https://github.com/RobertCNelson/Bootloader-Builder/blob/master/patches/v2018.03/0001-am335x_evm-uEnv.txt-bootz-n-fixes.patch#L859-L946
Regards,
Good evening Robert,
Sorry about the confusion, I sincerily tought you were the designer of the whole thing as you are the guru on every forum I visited about the beagleboard, and most of the work, if not all, seems to be under your name.
I wanted to stop by and thank you for the help, it worked great and it’s a lot faster this way than doing it manually.
Thank you and have a nice day.
Ben